Diplomatic: Letter from the Architectural Enclave
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Exposing the absurdities in urban geopolitics and persistent spatial logics of exclusivity is as important as proposing to hack into them. Critical of the innocence of so-called public space and the underlying architectural impasse, the book offers an investigative commentary on the state of urban enclaves, while speculating on alternative strategies by designing an embassy, a bounded pseudo-extraterritory and the epitome of an enclave.
Through absurd couplings and blatant image-making, a seemingly open US embassy is proposed for Beijing as an imploded fragment of a boundary, its incompleteness buttressed by other territories of privilege and its disparate barriers articulated as a mechanism of filtration. Away from popular strategies of conceptual and spatial blurring, the book defines an architectural porosity to orchestrate spaces of varying openness, as a nuanced response to both the embassy’s double identities and schizophrenic agendas of city-building.
With an architecture that is diplomatic by function and diplomatic by disposition, one experiments with an agency beyond the single pursuit of public-ness and an escape from the ideological enclave of positivism. Ultimately, the goal is to suggest and develop a methodology of designing with oppositions, irony and latency.
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Jie Zhang is a designer, researcher, writer and critic invested in deciphering contemporary spatial phenomena and provoking critical positions as a method towards both resistance and progress. She has taught at MIT and served as a design critic at various institutions in the US. She holds a Master of Architecture degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University. For further inquiries, please contact [email protected].
