This is a unique historic moment in China. New cities are emerging and they have developed
interesting and fantastically different features than the cities that we know
China has undergone a huge economic change in the past three decades, not only
expansions of cities but really creations of new cities
It is crucially important at this moment to bring students from the University of Virginia
to go to China to experience, develop insight, to prepare them for their careers as architects
in a rapidly changing world
It's like each of these cities is a laboratory for experimenting with
different modes of inhabitation, different ways in which you can put this many
people in one space and actually try to resolve the tensions that inevitably
emerge from that. I had read a lot about the construction boom and
I had never anticipated the effect that construction has on the environment
But it really influences the entire landscape and and the feel of these cities.
We have reached a point where the number
of people who live in cities are now equal to the number of people who live in the
countryside and that's a critical tipping point and it's made our world an urbanized
world rather than a rural world
What is unique to the UVA program at the School of Architecture
is that it actually begins at a very large urban scale instead of beginning
with a small building design. UVA begins trying to deal with as many problems as
once and it really throws the student into the deep end. It really tied into
my personal interests in looking beyond just a building, but how the building is a
part of this much larger system
We are living at a time when
all small local decisions that are made in relation to buildings and cities are
connected to a very complex network of economic forces, political forces, and environmental foces
Understanding of this force is essential to the future of human life on the planet