Inscriptions: Synthetic Poetics in Contemporary Architectural Practices in China

Abstract

This dissertation addresses a new ethos in architectural theory that has been emerging since the mid-1990s, as architects and scholars increasingly question the theory of the sign, which has been the “primary way to interpret and theorize architecture for nearly 50 years” (Hays, "From Sign to Inscription” 2). To address this recognition, this dissertation explores several openings in contemporary Chinese architectural practice for what might be called “synthetic poetics,” which move beyond text or image alone to investigate imbricated inscriptive practices—such as calligraphy, poetry, painting, and garden-making. Through this, the dissertation organizes and reconceptualizes architecture not as a system of signs rooted in a semiotic framework, but as an expanded field of inscriptions. While Western poetics focuses on the tension between painting and poetry—as inaugurated by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s distinction between synchronic visual arts and diachronic literary forms—certain contemporary Chinese architectural practices challenge notions of the uniqueness and autonomy of individual arts, often reviving study and analysis of the ancient arts of calligraphy and landscape painting. This thesis thus seeks to offer a reading of practices of marking and scripting as the techné of contemporary Chinese architecture by situating architectural analysis within the broader domain of artistic practice. Methodologically, it conducts a materialistic study of recent Chinese architecture through the cultural techniques of inscription, investigating what precedes architectural figuration: inscription, technicity, materiality, and the mnemonic. Through symptomatic reading, structural and formal analysis, this research examines a series of recent case studies by Chinese architects Liu Yichun, Zhu Xiaofeng, and Zhang Ke, hypothesizing that they employ various forms of synthetic poetics to move beyond semiotic constructions and reductive narratives about contemporary Chinese architecture. Like classical scholar gardens, their designs go beyond just text, image, or graphic ekphrasis, operating instead on the coalescence of different modes of making. This synthetic way of making is what the dissertation calls “synthetic poetics,” rooted in a longstanding tradition and the shared techné of inscriptive practices—such as calligraphy, poetry, painting, and garden-making. Building on literary critic and theorist Paul de Man’s framework of rhetoric, grammar, and allegory, which intersects with synthetic poetics through inverse synthesis, inscription is articulated through various conditions of tropology—imagetext, allography, and parataxis—which inhabit the limits and oscillations of text, image, and space. Each of these concepts and conditions is described in the following chapters; together, they articulate the major themes of the dissertation. An architecture of inscription conceives architectural projects as effects of complex, irreducibly multiple systems of relations, accessible not through text or image alone but through material marks and traces that bear attributes of both, and that also “spatialize” or reveal the intervals and differential relations between them. Through this framework, this dissertation proposes an alternative approach to contemporary architectural discourse after the decline of the Symbolic (Lacan)—one that situates contemporary practices within broader architectural, cultural, and intellectual traditions and allows a reworking of technicity and materiality beyond critical regionalisms.