Uncertainty: Experiments in Making from the Chinese Countryside

Abstract

Working in rural China is unlike other countrysides. It is full of contradiction, neither rural nor urban, both traditional and modern, abandoned in some areas while others are becoming cities overnight. It has become a spontaneous laboratory for new ways of living, and it is the inspiration for the multifarious explorations in making that are documented in this book. Whereas contemporary architecture since the advent of modernism has developed increasingly determinate, prototypical and standardized mechanisms for building, our experiments by contrast embrace the opposite: a resistance to control, taking place within the flux of political, social, and economic uncertainties. Collectively, the projects presented in this book manifest the contradictions and paradoxical conditions that are integral to the ongoing Chinese urbanization experiment — they could not have been conceived elsewhere.