Conscious Misreading

The study subject of this thesis is the phenomenon known as "a thousand cities with the same appearance" among contemporary Chinese cities, this thesis analyzes the causes and the characters of the status quo with focus on the modernity of unban aesthetics, and creatively brings up the Consciously Misread Theory which offer positive meanings for urban architecture as well as art and culture innovation. One character of this thesis is cross-subject theory researching and problem analyzing that covers a number of subjects and fields such as literature, aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, art, design, etc., and carries out some beneficial explorations of the research methodology of architecture and urban culture. The Consciously Misread Theory proposed in this thesis is a way of thinking as well as a way of creation, and it makes some contributions to theory innovation; besides the guidance function for artistic creation process, it also helps us to understand urban phenomenon and related theories from a new view point.The author thinks that today's Chinese society is in a "misreading" era, and misreading has become a common situation in daily life and can be found everywhere. "Misreading" is a concept came from literature, its original meaning is "read mistakenly" or "perceive mistakenly", but this thesis has developed this concept and emphasized its positive side, therefore making this concept became a method of perception and creation. Having the "misreading" concept is not enough; this thesis creatively integrates Chinese intelligentsia's culture consciousness and the "misreading" concept, and creates the unique Conscious Misread Theory. The key point of Consciously Misread Theory is to actively misread the original issue and create a fuzzy and multi-meaning misreading result, and the entire process is controlled by "consciousness". The embedding process of the modernity in China is a history of misreading, and we can find many consciously misreading modernity affairs in China's modern and contemporary history. The Consciously Misreading plays blending and catalyzing roles between elite and popular cultures, as well as radical and conservative cultures.The aesthetic modernity features of modern society are numerous and complicated, this thesis selected four representative and related categories by using key words, these four categories are:Nostalgia, Daily Life, Duplication and Distance; these categories are not isolated, but interact and echo with each other, and they form an integrated unit. They approximately cover the complete picture of the urban middle class's aesthetic culture, therefore, by deeply analyzing these categories, we can have a clear perception of today's urban culture and understand the significance of Consciously Misreading to urban culture. Urban aesthetic culture determines the forming of physical cultural appearances such as unban architecture and public art, therefore, when we study the phenomena of architecture and urban culture, we should not only concentrate on the research of methodology, instead, we should pay close attention to the factors of people. Only when we have a deep understanding about the reality, can we build decent urban culture status using Consciously Misreading, and guide people's aesthetic orientation toward future with domestic characters, protect differences and resist culture hegemony.This thesis places importance on the use of Consciously Misreading and summarizes three misreading methods under its category:fragmental misreading, symbolic misreading and simulacra, and they have both differences and relationships. Fragmental misreading is proposed for Nostalgia-the rapid speed of city life and fragmental living condition have caused the loss of feeling of belonging, the core of this method is to select fragmental symbols which is small but with important significance and then use misreading process to restore spirit fragments to allow people receiving satisfactory feeling of belonging. Symbolic misreading will have wide application in the field of architecture design, it has many similarities with various groups of postmodernism, but offers unique features in term of deliberately creating fuzzy misread images. The existence of fuzziness is well fit the trait of contemporary society-"the only certainty is uncertainty", and it also preserves more possibilities for the future. We can see reflections of symbolic misreading on many works of architecture masters. Just like the virtue design method in architecture field, it is summarized from duplication and simulation, with visions to the future, it is fit for the virtue life style of contemporary urban people. Consciously Misreading has strong originality, therefore it offers positive guidance function for cultural creative industry, especially, its "ignition" role will be helpful for the promotion of the industrialization and the rebuilding of urban culture characters.Consciously Misreading is a tool that absorbed the beneficial elements from both foreign cultures and domestic traditions, it is an advantageous weapon for the culture that in a weaker position to resist the stronger one and seek cultural revival and development; it has positive reference values for architecture, sculpture, landscaping, environmental art, artistic creation, design, etc.