IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

Suzhou is a heritage city with a rich inheritance of traditional architecture, the characteristics of which are part of Jiangnan culture in China. The Suzhou Museum, designed by I. M. Pei, has significantly constituted the new identity of the city. However, due to the neglect of seeing it as one fraction of the continuous heritage development, Suzhou Museum has always been treated as new architecture in the Suzhou context, a place with an extraordinarily long history. How it has helped the city search for re-conceptualisation of itself in the new world as a heritage city has been overlooked. The development of the Suzhou Museum is deeply ambivalent. The World Heritage label of the nearby Humble Administrator’s Garden has led to the intensification of conflicts between conceptions of heritage from the West, local people’s perception and local officials’ vision of modernity and heritage. Pei’s architecture has also intensified the outstanding culture of Suzhou as a particular type of city with international imperatives. This research explores how Pei’s design claims new cultural forms in a modern and international vision and simultaneously rebrands the old days of Suzhou. I argue that the Suzhou Museum has become a part of the city’s heritage, although it seems to be very contemporary, and it represents ambivalent global modernity enfolding in Suzhou in the 2000s. It is a mixture of Pei’s experiences of Americanized corporate modernism and Chinese classical aesthetics and a sense of form from his family and memory of China. It popularised the conception of Suzhou as a place with a particular type of aesthetics. Its design represents a culturally stretched understanding of Jiangnan heritage and modernity with transnational influences.