Anywise (review)

Reviews 83 view provides a basis for the reassessment of social conditions and contemporary cultural factors that affect patronage and creation and the meaning and function ofa work ofart. Art in China is an excellent book written by an author with an inquisitive, probing mind, worth reading by anyone seriously interested in China. George Kuwayama Los Angeles County Museum ofArt George Kuwayama is Senior Curator Emeritus ofFar Eastern Art. mi Cynthia C. Davidson, editor. Anywise. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 256 pp. Paperback $35.00, isbn 0-262-54082-7. Anywise is the fifth in a series of eleven planned volumes documenting the annual international cross-disciplinary conferences sponsored by Anyone Corporation to investigate the condition ofarchitecture at the end ofthe millennium. The book consists ofmore than a dozen offerings by such internationally renowned contributors as David Harvey, Peter Eisenman, Masao Miyoshi, Tao Ho, and Sandra Buckley, and it tries to address two major questions: (1) how can an urban building relate to the changing demands ofa city, and (2) how can a city meet its own needs in a globalized economy? Since a new form of international capital has emerged, and since the essence ofinternational capital is a concern with expanding markets, architecture has been reduced to the status of infrastructure. It is no longer seen to hold any symbolic or ideological value because the media have taken over the iconic role that architecture once played. Moreover, if the new architecture of simplicity is in reality an accommodation to the "downsizing" ofcapital projects, architecture has fallen into a new conservatism that has simply been dressed up to look modern. It has come to represent an ideology ofaccommodation to the realities of capitalism, and the architecture of accommodation thus satisfies the desire of capital for information. Meanwhile, as the city struggles to gain a competitive edge in a global network, it simultaneously strives to decentralize its functions in order to manage growth and to reduce its economic vulnerability to the unpre-© 1999 by University dictable forces ofthe market beyond its borders. It is perhaps in this context that ofHawat't Pressme ¡ssues 0faccommodation versus transgression, skill versus discipline, quantity versus quality, modernity versus technology, movement versus structure, process versus product, gradient fields versus discrete forms, and the narrative versus the 84 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 prescriptive, as well as issues of colonial domination and cultural imperialism, echo throughout the entire book. Because the conference represented by the essays here took place in a metropolitan setting in one ofthe newly industrialized "Asian Tiger" countries (Seoul, Korea), participants from the West seemed inclined to believe that NICs are good at "deciding" things—even though they often decide themselves to death. In other words, more haste simply results in less speed. Most developing countries, Asian countries included, posit the problem of quantity, ofmass production, on the basis of trivial models and on a scale and at a speed for which nobody seems to have adequate instruments for ensuring architectonic quality. In this vein, the current building boom taking place in China is viewed as another indiscriminate transplantation ofWesternization, and this is seen to be far from what true modernization should be. Nevertheless, this appears to be a general trend in most LDCs, and following this trend may be summarized as adhering to three major "faiths": (1) there is faith in "becoming"—but this is actually a faith in the present moment; (2) there is a faith in the existing reality, which necessarily privileges things; and (3) there is a faith in "being," which is consequendy oriented toward form. Ironically, modern life often creates unnecessary problems, and the solutions to these problems become an opportunity to make money. It may be observed that in the name ofmodernization, homogenization (or convergence, for that matter) occurs along certain lines that cut across national boundaries, and yet sharp differentiation (or divergence) still appears inside these boundaries. Throughout the entire conference, the participants discussed the palpable differences between the East and the West, between Asia and Europe. The dialogues and sometimes heated arguments nevertheless dealt only with visible conflicts and confusions. The anxiety over how architects can prevent the modern tragedy ofmid-century urbanization from...