Chinese Brutalism Today: Concrete and Avant-Garde Architecture

by Alberto Bologna

China is the largest consumer of cement and concrete in the world, the use of which has peaked in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Used for the construction of extensive infrastructure and buildings, over the last twenty years renowned Chinese architects have been working in and studying the constructive limits and spatial and superficial effects of exposed concrete. In the process, they have created a wave of avant-garde architecture in China. Chinese Brutalism Today investigates the compositional, formal, and ornamental reasons for this architecture and its different surface finishes, from rough to smooth. This new wave of Chinese Brutalism is, in large part, a regional evolution and development closely linked to local construction processes and the available labor force. The finished tectonics represent not only a way to read the architecture, but also reveals the complex decision-making processes and planning that led from the conception to construction of these buildings.

300 pages, Paperback

Published November 26, 2019

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A smart person once said that Brutalism was the only unrevivable 20th century architectural genre, and this argues otherwise, via an intense and detailed look at some recent Chinese architecture in the country's main material, concrete. By far the most interesting part is a long mid-section on how youngish architects like Wang Shu, Zhang Ke and Liu Jiakun have come to combine a sort of Chinese nationalism and local regionalism with hardcore concrete fetishism, a combination as interesting as Banham's original industrial chic/art brut/modern movement/communitarian nostalgia combo, described here with great attention to detail and well-chosen photographs. I rather wish Bologna had left the book at that, as the other chapters on more standard international Andoesque concrete work in China are less striking.