Publications

A promotional graphic for the book The Other Tradition of Modernism: Writing Contemporary Chinese Architecture, edited by Guanghui Ding. The image is divided into a yellow left column and a right section featuring a photograph of the Fuyang Cultural Complex lobby. The left column contains a blurb by Professor Marta Gutman, Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at CCNY, followed by a brief biography of Guanghui Ding and the school's logo at the bottom. The right section displays the book title in large white text against the background of the concrete lobby, where a group of people are seated on tiered steps while an individual photographs them. The bottom of the right section includes the text

The Other Tradition of Modernism

06. 05. 2026

Guanghui Ding

A new publication emerging from the Spitzer School of Architecture offers a compelling rethinking of architectural modernism through the lens of contemporary Chinese practice. The Other Tradition of Modernism: Writing Contemporary Chinese Architecture, edited by Guanghui Ding, Adjunct Associate Professor at the City College of New York, presents a curated collection of critical essays that foreground alternative architectural trajectories shaped by China’s distinct historical, cultural, and socio-political conditions.

Developed from an advanced seminar in 2025, this booklet represents a rigorous pedagogical experiment that bridges teaching and scholarship. Through a combination of lectures, writing workshops, and editorial guidance, students engaged deeply with a wide range of architectural works in China. The result is a set of essays that examine themes such as nation-state formation, memory, temporality, and nature, and questions of agency and autonomy in contemporary practice.

The booklet positions these student writings as serious critical investigations, demonstrating how architectural writing can function as both a laboratory for ideas and a method of research training. The volume is further distinguished by its careful curation of visual materials, integrating high-quality images with analytical text to reflect the spatial and material concerns central to architectural thinking.

In an endorsement, the Spitzer School of Architecture’s Dean, Marta Gutman, writes: “This volume… delivers a breath of fresh air to the study of contemporary architecture in China… 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.”

Bringing together emerging voices under a strong editorial framework, The Other Tradition of Modernism stands as both a pedagogical model and a scholarly intervention, expanding how modernism can be understood, taught, and written.

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