Local Cultures – Global Spaces
Abstract
The relief from the COVID-19 pandemic can be regarded as one global phenomenon of the immediate historicity that mingles issues of cultures, communities and society. However, architecture, as the representation, still suggests dramatic variables caused by different localities. That is, the post-pandemic global spaces still imply undeniable heterogeneity associated with various local cultures. Conspicuously, the imposition of social distancing has been displayed very differently in different places upon architectural treatment. This paper argues that such a built scenario can be understood through a ‘postcolonial-urban’ theorisation that integrates architecture’s inevitable engagements in the discourses of form and knowledge. The notion ‘postcolonial-urban’ here refers to a series of noticeable characters registered in the post-pandemic-built environment, including a sense of counter-dualism, the dynamics of domination and the reified subjectivation through the historicity of contemporary urbanity. Existing architectural scholarship that deals with cultures, communities and society hence needs a thorough re-examination into their suitability for responding the immediate historicity. For instance, the idea of critical regionalism which retains its criticality in the dominant discourse of architectural history and theory perhaps demands a historical-materialistic spectrum re-drawn between modernity and tradition. This paper argues that such a demand has already become sensible from the recent discourse of Asian architecture and urbanism – the engagements of some Asian metropolitan areas in shaping forms of the so-called alternative modernity and the urban-vernacular are examples. To further consolidate such argumentation, this paper intends to examine empirically the post-pandemic architectural treatment in Taipei, Taiwan, as a preliminary yet critical pilot study.
Francis Chia-Hui Lin is Associate 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. His books include Heteroglossic Asia (2015), Architectural Theorisations and Phenomena in Asia (2017) and The Postcolonial Condition of Architecture in Asia (2022).