The Languages of China

Architecture, Canon and Institution in Contemporary Practice

Abstract

At first glance, the architecture of the Chinese city over the last twenty years appears summary and awkwardly emphatic, a mirror of all the commonplaces of contemporaneity, as compliant as that of yesterday, from the Maoist period, and often heavily academic. Yet, as one gradually deepens one’s understanding of today’s Chinese cities and of the university as a place for the education of architects – still holding a position of considerable importance even in relation to professional practice – it becomes increasingly clear that an exceptional school of architecture is actively at work in Beijing.
China, like every empire, has been represented and defined throughout history above all by its language: a complex cultural and political canon, constantly refined in order to reduce to unity the many Chinas and the many non-Chinas present within a space as vast as a continent and open to incursions by external cultures. The Middle Kingdom has experienced different dynasties and ethnic groups, fragmentation and recomposition, invasions and resistance. Yet, through all this, Chinese culture has survived as a unitary language of ever-increasing complexity.
Seen from the outside, it appears that it is not so much the peoples of China as its culture – its languages more than its spoken tongues, its architecture more than its architects – that constitute the true subject of history. Ideographic writing is the clearest symbol of this condition: a complex system capable of transmitting tens of thousands of ideas without phonetic mediation, legible across different dialects and languages.
The official spoken language, modern Mandarin, employs extremely ancient signs. It is thanks to this writing system that imperial edicts, poems, novels and administrative texts could be understood across regions separated by vast linguistic distances. China’s political unity was, first and foremost, a unity of language.
China, with its unitary imperial canon – rigid yet extraordinarily inclusive – has, over time, assimilated all the cultures that approached it, transforming even the most aggressive influences into integrated elements. Like an organism capable of metabolising every novelty, Chinese culture has produced many different Chinas, all traceable back to a single ordering principle.