Diplomatic: Letter from the Architectural Enclave
Энэ электрон номын тухай
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.
Зохиогчийн тухай
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].
