Featuring hundreds of photographs and extensive commentary, this modern architecture and design book showcases the dynamic structures of today's China. by China's booming cities are evolving at a dizzying speed, and her new wealth has created a dynamic environment for architecture and construction. New China Architecture documents the spectacular transformation modern China has undergone in recent decades as the heady push to prosperity has inspired architects from China and around the globe to produce striking new designs. Award-winning professor of architecture, Xing Ruan, covers the entire range of China's most captivating new building projects—from Shanghai skyscrapers to public buildings in Beijing and Guangzhou, and from cutting-edge private homes and gleaming new airports to theaters and universities throughout China. Over the past few decades, architects, urban planners, and design aficionados everywhere have watched China's spectacular urban transformation with awe, and New China Architecture offers them a closer look at the country's most innovative new buildings.

A new design expression is being formed in China as architects look internally for visionary design instead of toward the West.

Investigating the rich architecture of post-Mao China and its broad cultural impact In the years following China's Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country's reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms, Cole Roskam underlines architecture's unique ability to shape space as well as behavior. Roskam traces how foreign influences like postmodernism began to permeate Chinese architectural discourse in the 1970s and 1980s and how figures such as Kevin Lynch, I. M. Pei, and John Portman became key forces in the introduction of Western educational ideologies and new modes of production. Offering important insights into architecture's relationship to the politics, economics, and diplomacy of post-Mao China, this unprecedented interdisciplinary study examines architecture's multivalent status as an art, science, and physical manifestation of cultural identity.

A collection of essays on architecture of modern China, arranged chronologically covering a period from 1729 to 2008, focusing mainly on the twentieth century. The distinctive feature of this book is a blending of ‘critical’ and ‘historical’ research, taking a long-range perspective transcending the current scene and the Maoist period. This is a short, elegant book that condenses the wide subject matter into key topics.

A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West. Original Copies presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford. In recounting the untold and evolving story of China’s predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bianca Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in “duplitecture” implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China. With her lively, authoritative narrative, the author shows us how, in subtle but important ways, these homes and public spaces shape the behavior of their residents, as they reflect the achievements, dreams, and anxieties of those who inhabit them, as well as those of their developers and designers. From Chinese philosophical perspectives on copying to twenty-first century market forces, Bosker details the factors giving rise to China’s new breed of building. Her analysis draws on insights from the world’s leading architects, critics and city planners, and on interviews with the residents of these developments.

About the most important and interesting contemporary architects from China and their projects at home and abroad.

This book provides an illustrated introduction to Chinese architecture, a reference for modern design and a window into China's history.