Contemporary Chinese Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

Saskia Sassen, the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, predicts in her co-authored book “The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda” that, in the future cities will become our crucial battlefield as we continue to fight against gentrification and growing degree of isolation in our communities. Sassen argues that, “Cities should be an inclusive space for both the affluent and the poor. Nevertheless, in reality our cities never achieved equality for all, because our cities were never designed that way. Still cities ought not to be a place that tolerates inequality or injustice”.

Over the course of the last decade there has been a growing interest in the handcrafted buildings, as well as in the application of local and renewable materials in building construction. Under the concerns about the heavy environmental and economic expenses caused by construction, nowadays urban planners are embracing the concept of sustainability, which refers to “meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Both tea and alcohol in traditional China were similarly aestheticized, and both influenced the language of literature and art. People used to exchange alcohol as a gift in a way that they later would with tea. Today, more and more cities in China have embraced this drinking culture that passed down from generation to generation, and reinterpreted with a new contemporary fashion, which is constantly evolving in the urban cafes and bars.

3D printing (as known as three-dimensional printing) is a type of rapid prototyping technology. It is a technology that uses powdered metal or plastic and other bondable materials to construct objects by printing layer by layer based on digital model files.

When we are discussing the definition of “structure”, the term varies within different disciplines. In the context of the built environment, "structure" refers to anything that is constructed or built from different interrelated parts with a fixed location on the ground.

The American architect, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller once defined the Dymaxion principle as “constructing ever more with ever less weight, time, and ergs per each given level of functional performance.”