Traveling Ideas: Appropriation and Identity in the China-Sri Lanka Architectural Exchanges

Abstract

AbstractDrawing upon the concept of “appropriation”, this chapter seeks to understand the processes by which Chinese architectural professionals incorporated and synthesized various aesthetic and intellectual sources in the transnational practice of China’s architectural exports to the Global South. By focusing on China’s engagement with Sri Lanka and on the work of the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH) and later Nelum Pokuna Theater in Colombo and on the manifestation of appropriation in contemporary transcultural practice, this chapter traces the interactions between an intention to respond to local tropical climatic condition and an approach to appropriate Chinese, Sri Lankan, and international architectural culture. It argues that the appropriation, synthesis and transformation of architectural ideas from various contexts created new forms of identity which articulated political and cultural manifestations. Formally and technically, the Chinese architects’ attempt to adopt an appropriate aesthetics of tropics away from a domestic kind of socialist realism was premised upon an effort to create building able to reflect Sri Lanka’s environmental and cultural identity. The juxtaposition of appropriating Sri Lankan architecture in both Colombo and in China suggests that the dual mobility of architectural ideas helped contribute to forming new political and cultural identities urgently needed both by the Bandaranaike administration and by a group of emerging Chinese architects.