Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China
Edited by Christopher CM Lee

The Harvard GSD AECOM Project on China was a three-year research and design project premised on two fundamental ambitions: recuperating an idea of the city and pursuing alternative forms of urbanization in response to the challenges posed by the developmental city in China. Each year, the Project on China focused on a theoretical problem and practical challenge posed by the model of the developmental city in China, using a particular city as an exemplar: the megaplot with Xiamen as a case study; the future of the city in city-regions and the effects of cross-border urbanization, with Macau as the paradigm; and the status of the countryside in the context of state-driven initiatives to urbanize rural areas.

Buy it here.

Taiqian The Countryside as a City
Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China, Part 3
Edited by Christopher C. M. Lee

"Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City" in Chinadocuments the third year of a three-year research and design study on the future of the Chinese city. A collection of essays and design conjectures, this report focuses on the Chinese countryside and particularly on the government policies of “townisation”, or rural urbanisation. Asserting that current development strategies ignore the long-lived cultural and social connection between villagers and the farmland, the studio projects present an alternative strategy, conceiving alternatives for the future of the rural China that dissolve distinctions between rural and urban, city and countryside and architecture and landscape. The critique recuperates the cultural logic of Chinese civilisation that underpins all its aesthetic production: the alternation of binary opposites, in this case the reciprocal elements of architecture and landscape, to maintain equilibrium. It sows the seed for an alternative idea of the city for China.

Read the report here.

Macau: Cross-Border City
Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China, Part 2
Edited by Christopher C. M. Lee

"Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China" documents the second year of a three-year research and design study on the future of the Chinese city. A collection of essays and design conjectures, this report focuses on the city of Macau and particularly on the challenges faced by cities in city-regions and the effects of cross-border urbanization. Asserting that the tropes used to describe and understand the border and its architecture fall short, the studio projects present an alternative urban strategy, conceiving a common framework for the border and its supporting facilities. The critique reconceptualizes the inherent architecture and spatiality of the cross-border city, its implicit ambition to bring about a city that is plural and equitable. It sows the seed for an alternative idea of the city for China. 

Read the report here.

The City as a Project 
Edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli

The city is often depicted as a sort of self-organizing chaos. This collection of essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, makes the case for the opposite hypothesis: The city is always the result of political intention, often in the form of specific architectural projects. Cities are shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions. This thesis is substantiated by eight thoroughly researched essays scrutinizing a fascinating line-up of urban conditions across more than two thousands years of history: from the political theology of the Islamic city to the political economy of Renaissance architecture; from the rise of public architecture in 17th-century France to the laissez-faire development of the contemporary Greek city; from the exemplary teachings of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand to the collaborative work of Hannes Meyer; and from the plan of the Mesoamerican metropolis to that of the Fordist factory floor. In challenging the split between theory and practice, The City as a Project reveals the powerful ways in which the city arises from the constant interaction between ideas and spatial conditions.

Includes the essay ‘The Deep Structure of Type: The Construction of a Common Knowledge in Durand’s Method’ by Christopher C. M. Lee. 

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Xiamen: The Megaplot
Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China, Part 1
Edited by Christopher C. M. Lee

Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China documents the first year of a three-year research and design study on the future of the Chinese city. A collection of essays and design conjectures, this report focuses on the city of Xiamen and particularly on the ubiquitous megaplot. Asserting that the megaplot has dissolved the idea of the city as a common space, the studio projects present an alternative urban strategy, conceiving a common framework for housing, work space, nature, and civic functions. The critique recuperates the cultural logic of Chinese civilization that underpins all its aesthetic production: the alternation of binary opposites, in this case the reciprocal elements of architecture and landscape, to maintain equilibrium. It sows the seed for an alternative idea of the city for China.

Read the report here.

Human Experience and Place: Sustaining Identity
Edited by Paul Brislin

Exceptional architecture stands in the face of the negative aspects of commercial globalisation by celebrating the spirit of individual place; and by being rooted in its culture, its geography and in the experience and value systems of the people that have created it. By drawing from work across the world, this issue of AD will demonstrate that it is possible for architects, designers and engineers to design outstanding buildings that sustain a sense of local identity, both in terms of cultural heritage and the conservation of the environment. In the last few years, a groundswell of critical resistance to the homogenised imposition of a form-driven universal architecture, which defies local context, has continued to grow unabated, as has developing interest in an alternative pathway to the design of buildings.

Includes the essay ‘Common Artefact’by Christopher C. M. Lee.

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Working in Series
Christopher C. M. Lee & Kapil Gupta

The construction of a mental habit that systematically confronts the complexities and the contradiction of the architectural profession is what characterises the work of Serie. Serie searches for a level of coherence that goes beyond iconic recognition. Its method is an attempt to coincide and negotiate the two extremes of architecture: the commitment to the city and its project, and the definition of an architectural method discernible in its own disciplinary terms. Serie works in the direction of reconciling the disputatio between city and design, and the framework of this reconciliation is the idea of type. According to Serie, type is in itself a form of conflict between the idea of the project, its ‘why do’ and the praxis of the project, its ‘how to’. In the intentions of Serie, this modus operandi aims not only for a coherent production, but also for a conceptual intelligibility of the method itself towards the production of generic design knowledge. – Pier Vittorio Aureli

Read an excerpt here.

Typological Urbanism: Projective Cities
Edited by Christopher C. M. Lee & Sam Jacoby

How can architecture today be simultaneously relevant to its urban context and at the very forefront of design? For a decade or so, iconic architecture has been fuelled by the market economy and consumers′ insatiable appetite for the novel and the different. The relentless speed and scale of urbanisation, with its ruptured, decentralised and fast–changing context, though, demands a rethink of the role of the designer and the function of architecture. This title of 2 confronts and questions the profession′s and academia′s current inability to confidently and comprehensively describe, conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project new ideas for architecture in relation to the city. In so doing, it provides a potent alternative for projective cities: Typological Urbanism. This pursues and develops the strategies of typological reasoning in order to re–engage architecture with the city in both a critical and speculative manner. Architecture and urbanism are no longer seen as separate domains, or subservient to each other, but as synthesising disciplines and processes that allow an integrating and controlling effect on both the city and its built environment.

Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City
Edited by Christopher C. M. Lee & Sam Jacoby

This collection of student projects from the AA’s Diploma Unit 6 encapsulates a generational shift. After the past decade of deep (and sometimes, it would appear, deeply self-satisfied) explorations into new digital and computational design tools, “Typological Formations” demarcates a return to the city as the overt site, not just for architecture but for architectural thinking. A quick glance through this book will confirm the obvious: sophisticated parametric tools are all over these projects, but they are no longer a topic or focus in and of themselves.Instead, such tools are merely brought to bear on the design agenda: the search for ‘renewable’ building types that are able to negotiate the rapidly changing circumstances of cities in an era of global capitalism. Already this search has yielded some incredible early results. With this book, the idea of an architectural ‘type’ seems more supple – that is, more differentiated and therefore more relevant and productive – than ever. “Typological Formations” is nothing less than a manifesto for a return to projects and project-based forms of architectural knowledge today.

Read the book here.