Abstract:This dissertation joins the contemporary debate on rewriting the history of Chinese architecture by critically (re-)examining the initial stage of discourse formation during the Republican period. Focusing on the ordinary house in the city, I excavate the popular voice on Chinese architecture from the newspapers and magazines, examine the municipal government’s effort in modernizing the city and life, as well as the professional community’s attempt to establish the authoritative figure of the modern architect to replace that of the traditional craftsman. I show that these different constituencies of Chinese architecture articulated and presented a more vibrant and complex scene of discourse and practice than we have recognized until now. Although each held different forms of power, and focused on different issues, these early interpreters of Chinese architecture nevertheless converged on their understanding of reforming the Chinese house and Chinese architecture. The municipal government’s modernizing projects in the city served to bolster the professional community’s claim to expertise that culminated in writing a new history of Chinese architecture. This history subsequently became the standard historiography, suppressing and subsuming the popular voice and relegating it to history’s dustbin for decades. By retrieving the popular discourse of Chinese architecture from this period, we not only gain a fuller understanding of the formative stage of Chinese architectural historiography, but are also provided with helpful indications pointing to a possible route to rewrite the history of Chinese architecture.

Key words: architectural history, Chinese architecture, historiography, popular discourse, modernity in China, modern China

This dissertation presents the first architectural history of American hackerspaces, a project designed to explore and understand the evolution of a countercultural form of architecture and entrepreneurial social space that has become common in postindustrial and post-recession US cities. Examining six hackerspaces of varied sizes and constituencies established in the Detroit and San Francisco metropolitan areas between 2007 and 2013, the dissertation considers how hackerspaces interface with American public life and public space. It argues that while nonprofit hackerspaces position themselves as public resources to ameliorate post-recession economic and social precarity, spatially and socially they tend to repeat the exclusionary politics of public space that permeate US urban and architectural history, where spaces that strive to be all-inclusive alternatives to state and market structures fracture along identity lines and unevenly allocate their resources. The dissertation examines, for example, how predominantly white and masculine cultures in the first US hackerspaces led to communal reckonings, increasing insularity, and offshoot hacker spaces that center women, LGBTQIA communities, and other marginalized constituents. Using fieldwork and engagement with vernacular architecture, global urbanism, and media studies literature, the dissertation explores the tension-filled transition of hacker communities from diffuse countercultural scenes to formal participants in the urban fabric. Using interdisciplinary methods to interpret original photographs, architectural documentation, and ethnographic data collected between 2018 and 2022, the dissertation demonstrates how hackerspace communities active in the San Francisco and Detroit areas inscribe digital and political utopianism in physical space. Hackerspace cultures and buildings thus offer microcosms of how aspirations of openness, diversity, and access to public resources outside the bounds of corporate culture, academia, and government programs fracture along identity lines. Centering the fugitive spatial practices of hackerspaces, the dissertation offers new directions for an inclusive architectural history of normalized precarity in post-recession and COVID pandemic-era cities in the US.