Presenter
Ruo Jia
Founder & Director, IfWorks
Harvard GSD, Pratt Institute faculty
Discussant
Catherine Ingraham
Pratt Institute faculty, author of Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity
A Broken Circle: Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory
This lecture presents Ruo’s on-going book project “A Broken Circle: Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory” based on her dissertation work from Princeton University. The project breaks the enclosures of the now canonical Chinese Experimental Architecture as well as French Poststructuralist Theory by interweaving them together in a new narrative that overcomes both the nationalism/essentialism related to the former and the eurocentrism/orientalism related to the latter, in their specific spatial-temporal materiality organized with a broken circle. It opens a different decolonizing, positive, and collaborative space rethinking and embodying different postmodernist materialist possibilities with alterities, identities, and relations.
