Publications and Research
Document Type
Book
Publication Date
Spring 4-15-2026
Abstract
The Other Tradition of Modernism emerges from a pedagogical experiment at the City College of New York, where the editor taught a course on modern and contemporary Chinese architecture to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Combining thematic lectures, student presentations, writing workshops, and intensive editorial mentoring, the course sought to illuminate an alternative trajectory of architectural modernism. Geographically, it introduced modern Chinese architectural practices that developed outside Western modernist paradigms; culturally, it foregrounded context-based approaches that resist the hegemony of iconic, spectacle-driven architecture under contemporary neoliberal market logics.
This edited volume, composed of student contributions, articulates several key insights. First, the essays engage critical architectural questions and demonstrate the richness of contemporary Chinese practice as a fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue. Second, architectural writing functions as both an incubator for emerging ideas and a laboratory for research training, strengthening students’ capacities for articulation, analysis, and critical thinking. Third, the volume exemplifies the mutually generative relationship between teaching and research: cutting-edge scholarly inquiries enter the classroom to expand students’ intellectual horizons, while pedagogical engagement with emerging phenomena, in turn, stimulates and informs the editor’s own research.
This volume is intended for readers and researchers seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese architectural practices, professional systems, and cultural traditions.
Comments
Review:
“This volume, edited by Dr. Guanghui Ding, delivers a breath of fresh air to the study of contemporary architecture in China. It grows out of a marvelous course that Dr. Ding taught at the Spitzer School of Architecture to students in the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs. Based on the premise that modernism unfolded in China under distinct historical conditions, this gifted architectural historian called on his more than decade-long research to introduce students to an extraordinary range of work in China that was little known to them. This excellent collection of essays, written by students and edited expertly by Dr. Ding, is the result of their engagement with rich material and Dr. Ding’s dedication. I urge you to dig in, and to read, and to learn from this challenge to the western canon, which reconstructs modernism as a historically contingent, rich, and contested process.”
Professor Marta Gutman, Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, City University of New York