an enchanted disenchantment

Dali Ancient City is a well noted historic city in China. But in recent years, with the aggressive development of tourism economy and the invasion of modern culture, the original life in Dali has changed dramatically. The social problems that the city is facing are typical with historic cities in this era. The surplus material goods offered the possibility for massive collectivistic construction where city development might no longer be decided by the residents and the surrounding objective conditions, but rather a limited group of representatives or the greater will of the society. With this shift of ownership, the individual life is affected and controlled by what we defined as ‘implicit totalitarianism’, including the grand urban policy, the dominant social culture and economic efficiency. Thus, the individual adaptive behavior in the construction phase in response to this condition is confined in both scale and form; and the city form, as the product of these behaviors in a macroscopic manner, is often paradoxical and perplexing when observed from history.

Graduation Thesis I 2015 Fall I Urban Manifesto of Dali Location: Dali, Yunan, China Collabrator: Liu Ke, Cao Junchuan

an urban manifesto
“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.” 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            ― Milan Kundera

The surplus material goods offered the possibility for massive collectivistic construction where city development might no longer be decided by the residents and the surrounding objective conditions, but rather a limited group of representatives or the greater will of the society. With this shift of ownership, the individual life is affected and controlled by what we defined as ‘implicit totalitarianism’, including the grand urban policy, the dominant social culture and economic efficiency.The surplus material goods offered the possibility for massive collectivistic construction where city development might no longer be decided by the residents and the surrounding objective conditions, but rather a limited group of representatives or the greater will of the society. With this shift of ownership, the individual life is affected and controlled by what we defined as ‘implicit totalitarianism’, including the grand urban policy, the dominant social culture and economic efficiency.

City development: 1914, 1984, 2008, 2015

The conflict in context between old  and new/ the optimizatinon of the urban proposition

The dreamers and fugitives in the city/an alternative pursuit of urban topology

The Rationale of the New Town

New Urban Layour: 
Homogenized urban grid identifies the massive construction in a collective manner. From another perspective, it also expresses urban liberty. The grid confines individual visual expressions within a predetermined systematic form. However, when this restriction is designed to bear the necessities of daily life, it begins to liberate the time and vigor devoted to these routine actions, towards ones spiritual and artistic pursuit.

Housing Topology and Combination Methodology

Housing Units: 
In this project, paranoiac-critical method was used for the urban design phase to illustrate the modern city development revealed by the current situation of Dali; with the discussion of the relationship between efficiency-orientated and comfort- orientated space strategies, the differentiated individual desire and human behavior hierarchy, the design attempt to redefine the role that architecture might be playing in the process of modernism by replacing the aforesaid ‘implicit totalitarianism’ with architects’ new totalitarian strategy.

Axonometric Drawing of the New Town

The Living Machine and Communal Space of the New Town

other public spaces of the new town & model photography
In the phase of architecture design, the discussion was furthered as the design strategy came down to certain buildings on the original site. The series of collage between the original building and the iden􀆟cal space form from the urban design offered an interim from the current urban development pa􀆩ern to the declara􀆟on that I a􀆩empted to make in former discussions.
View under the Urban Plaza
Under the most crowded part of the city, space for the reflec􀆟on on life and death were hidden. In the design, construc􀆟on elements were abstracted from the architecture ontology and made emblema􀆟c to create the transparency of 􀆟me, or in other words, make this process of

The People’s Library near the Lake Bank

View from the Urban Plaza

The Urban Plaza

an enchanted disenchantment - entrance & history museum of the new town
Philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first place with poetic metaphysics; that is science that looks for proof not in, the external world, but in the very modifications of the minds that meditates on it.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           - Giambattista Vico

Ground Level Plan

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                - Max Weber
Modernity, according to German sociologist Max Weber, associated directly with the rationalization process of the world’s disenchantment; while starting the process of secularization, it also cost the world to become an instrumental rationality system where efficiency is the primary goal of everything. Thus, the re-enchantment, as opposed to instrumental rationalism, is the re-discovery of the new evaluation system of the human society moralities.
Modernity, according to German sociologist Max Weber, associated directly with the rationalization process of the world’s disenchantment; while starting the process of secularization, it also cost the world to become an instrumental rationality system where efficiency is the primary goal of everything. Thus, the re-enchantment, as opposed to instrumental rationalism, is the re-discovery of the new evaluation system of the human society moralities.

The Engraving of Time

The detial design of the time-engraving museum aims at celebrate the natural combination of building elements that are compsed by the master of time.
Modernity, according to German sociologist Max Weber, associated directly with the rationalization process of the world’s disenchantment; while starting the process of secularization, it also cost the world to become an instrumental rationality system where efficiency is the primary goal of everything. Thus, the re-enchantment, as opposed to instrumental rationalism, is the re-discovery of the new evaluation system of the human society moralities.
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