(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
It is generally agreeable that the built environment registers not only material overtones but also social, cultural and political implications. The former aspect suggests tangible values and the latter implies intangible ones. Most importantly, the former also suggests synchronic experiences of the ongoing cultural blending and the latter implies diversified forms of historicity. This intricate relationship between the natural and human environments has witnessed the notion of heritage and defined it as the founding of certain values. The process of forming this relationship – the heritagisation – therefore implies a sense of display, i.e., heritagisation is a form of musealisation that certain values are centralised and underscored. In the current state, digital technologies and computerisation are leading mediums that translate this implication of heritagisation, as they not only create possibilities for physical built practices but also abstracts the social reality from its complexities. However, this transition renders the notion of ‘society’ as problematic for architectural theory as it is never reflected entirely by the technologies alone but with essentially the immaterial meaning registered within. This paper centres around a concern with how to construct a more grounded and less volatile theory capable of dealing with such problematic of abstractness implied by digitisation. This paper argues that the ‘virtuality’ suggested by digital architecture has no difference from the virtuality of discourse speaking for spatial abstractness within the same context of heritagisation. From a theoretical perspective, this paper emphasises the significance of relative space rather than absolute space and intends to underscore the social dynamics of the built environment. As a methodology, empirical Asian built cases selected from Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are analysed as elaboration. Structurally, the discussion of this paper starts from a theorisation of intangible built form and ends with comparisons with case studies from their tangible representations.
Dr Francis Chia-Hui Lin is an architectural historian, theoretician and curator. He is currently an assistant professor at National Taiwan University. His areas of expertise lie in the critical discourse on architecture and urbanism within a wider framework of history and theory. Amongst his interests, a particular focus is examining the immediate historicity of postcoloniality in the Asia Pacific region that is resulted from the inescapable marriage with the prevailing Western epistemology. He publishes and reviews academic works in cross-national and transdisciplinary communities. His books include Heteroglossic Asia (2015) and Architectural Theorisations and Phenomena in Asia (2017). In 2019, Francis was awarded the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award – the outstanding research award for young researchers in Taiwan.