Skyscrapers with Chinese Character

CHINA, 2012

“Scholar’s Rocks” (I’m a minor collector) are prized for their strangeness, their effective miniaturization of mountains and rock faces, and, for me, for their intense architectural incipience.  So many of these objects seem to be buildings-in-becoming and our computational and construction technology are at the point of making this translation possible.  These collages are meant to be taken sort of seriously.  The multi-national system of architectural production has effectively dislocated the local, which now devolves on the singularities of starchitect signature or on the trivial rear-guardism that continues to blight the official Chinese architectural imagination, with its “big roofs,” moon-gates, and other sadly inauthentic allusionism.  Why not take a leap towards something at once deeply familiar and still architecturally unseen?

Credits: J. Gu, M. Sorkin