 |
 But while the older generation of architects had a relatively slower clock-time and unmediated real-space, and desire to resist homogenisation, could it all collapse under the avalanche of change that is taking the contemporary world by storm? Is architecture still a vital container of history and identity in our contemporary age, where identities are a lot more fluid? And can it still manage to uphold its task under the present phenomenon of extreme increase in built quantities which seems to overwhelm existing strategies of identity, not to mention conventional operative modes of architecture symbolism? Can it survive the onslaught of influences brought about by the incredible electronic revolution? |
||
 |
|||
The constitution of the 'west' and the values it embodies have also changed. For instance, does the importation of an I.M. Pei building to Asia represent an importation of 'western' values? Does the imposition of Chinese fengshui principles on Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank make it any less 'western'? Furthermore, the source of modern technologies especially and architectural reproduction by the print media, is no longer the sole purview of the 'west'. Japan, now plays an equally important role now. Tokyo is also hailed as one of the triumvirate of first rung global cities (Sassen). This development renders the modernisation equals westernisation view problematic. As noted over and over again most famously by Manuel Castells, then by others, many parts of Asia are confronting severe transformations of physical and cultural landscapes; the result of fundamental changes in the historical landscape that is shaping our contemporary world. The production of architecture and its discourses are implicated in the new Asian landscape defined culturally, economically, and socially. Its newness is a direct consequence of macro-transformations in economic and cultural systems in the contemporary world as a result of a technological revolution centred around information, precipitates a new historical landscape; one which is based on the 'informational society.' And more so, the primacy of non-material information as the material foundation of society further threatens to destabilise the prevailing meanings and structures of material social and economic life. "Space and time, the material foundations of human experience, have been transformed, as the space of flows dominate the space of places, and timeless time supersedes clock time of the industrial era," says Castells. Therefore specificities of place and of identities become insignificant to this system of economic organisation, which tends to transport its own culture along. These physical transplantations sometimes dislodge and replace existing built fabric, and therefore local communities embedded in the host stratum. More significantly, they transmit their value systems directly through their transient managerial executives. Even more effectively, trans-territorial flows of information in a global network further transmit these values by electronic media and at the same time integrate diverse cultures into an interwoven electronic web of an emergent trans-global urban culture. In Asia, the impact of this phenomenon is visibly pronounced. In China, hordes of the rural population arrive en masse in the train stations to get a piece of the action in the cities. In Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore and Bangkok, the MTV generation has arrived and conspicuously 'hangs out' in shopping malls, before it is time for them to be packed off to universities in the west. Young executives sip café lattes at chic coffee bars; newly rich families spend their weekends scouring condominium show apartments or holiday resort deals. Internet and computer game cafes make their appearances, and trans-national unskilled labour take over entire districts on their day-offs. Old quarters in the city and buildings rendered obsolete by the new economic structure, through a gentrification process are thematised and re-adapted for new commercial and cultural uses that the global tourism trade synergetically latches onto. This is the new landscape of Asia.  The production of architecture in Asia can no longer be resolved in the way that the older critical regionalism discourse tries to reclaim a new value for architecture. Identities have changed, tradition and modernity, 'east' and 'west' are not so neatly defined any more. Sometimes, the 'east' is more 'west' than the 'west'; and sometimes; the 'west' sometimes has become culturally more conservative than the 'east'. That is no to say that there are no longer oppositions or contestations between these categories. In the face of an emergent homogeneous global urban culture, diminished significance of place, and the predominance of non-material informationalism, these contestations are sometimes better recast as negotiations between the global and the local, since the global systems that prop up a globalised economy still requires a local ground to sustain it. The sites of these contestations are now situated both in real and 'virtual' places where global and the local intersect. How do we leap-frog the intrinsically stultifying concerns of privileging one identity over another? Do we let ourselves be strait-jacketed by the politics of identity or succumb to the easy temptation of identity-less genericity? Could there be an emergent new 'identity' that sees its constitution as a fluid body of various forces and fields, global and local? Diversity of approaches and attempts that consciously reflect upon this issue can be seen in emerging architectural practices from Singapore to Mumbai. The hybridity of impulses that these works consciously announce or subconciously embody, characterise the often difficult terrain of navigation in the production of space in Asia at the moment. next---- >> <-- previous |
|||