VIRTUAL Barcelona
Abstract
Conventionally, heritage stands for the value of the past for the present, whereas this paper proposes a theorisation that nourished by historical materialism, taking contemporary Asian architecture as an example. The contemporaneity of architecture today, arguably, suggests a standpoint moving from the linearity of historicism to various forms representing the immediate historicity. As evidence, the ‘development’ of a place is no longer synonymous with ‘progression’ but ‘adaptation’ – e.g., gentrification has been found its impact on the regional cultural politics and materiality has understood alternatively. To elaborate such a phenomenon, this paper theorises the notion of living heritage inspired by Asian architecture and urbanism today. As a central argument, this study believes that a specific region’s immediate historicity displays a unique sense of quality, which the word ‘display-ness’ is used to denote it. Display-ness hence implies a process of musealisation, which involves not only materialisation, visualisation and spatialisation but also institutionalisation. That is to say, the sense of heritage today cannot avoid the interventionism of the power/knowledge manipulation of the geopolitics worldwide. In Asia, through an examination of its architecture and urbanism as a historical-materialistic representation, the ‘displayed’ architectural quality has gradually concentrated from a context of modernism to one that might be entitled to colonial modernity and currently reflects a new wave of subjectivation. Examining Japan and Singapore strategically, this paper presents a critical architectural history to testify the notion. As a theoretical common divisor, display-ness hence is able to articulate urban futures and cultural pasts as a whole.
Dr 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).