This work attempts to integrate the thermodynamic project with the broad theoretical implications of building cities in China. It is built upon an idea about the Flimsy and the Fortified as two ubiquitous and predominant material organization/assembly types in Chinese urbanizing protocols. As distinct conditions, they are conceptualized as independent but interconnected types which dominate the existing Chinese landscape. Neither formal types nor functional types, the flimsy and the fortified are recognized as ubiquitous patterns of material organization in China which tend on the one hand toward the light, the artificial, the mass manufactured, the insubstantial, the inexpensive, the temporary, the porous, the flimsy -- and on the other hand towards the heavy, the over-structured, the megalithic, the massive, the elephantine, the solid, the fortified.

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The project presents an architecture which judicially revises Chinese urbanization ideologies from within, through new logics of energy-driven spatial subdivisions – as a sort of camouflaged radicality, the project wishes to blend without friction into and out of mega-plot development and its associated modular exuberance. These new logics are executed through thermodynamically driven operative sequences -- explicit design protocols which are able to reconcile the form of the building with the form of the city (perhaps the ultimate problem of Modernity) on the unstable but voracious ground of the Chinese economy.

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The conglomerate, equally an operation and an object, has the capacity for ambiguity necessary to integrate these various concepts. The formal articulation of the project is the result of a sequence of geographic discretization, typological taxonimization, primitive transformation and performance-driven iteration which drive always the overall ability of the system to essentially do one thing: put heat to work. Sectional complexification of the ground plane and the planimetric compression/deformation of thermodynamic primitives characterize the work. Feedbacks are woven into the system: towers cool courtyards; large thermal masses reciprocate with shady, shallow pools; fresh air from vegetated arteries pull through buoyant urban alleys to promote cross-ventilation.

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The material which was produced in this investigation is the record of a dialectic process, which oscillated between the making of a manifesto -- ambitious, speculative, not tame, intentionally detached -- and the establishment of explicit design protocols -- restricted, operative, precise, pedantic. Each an established and effective methodology in their own right, the two integrated together create contradictions which are productive but also difficult. Oriented around the problem of the new urban conglomerate in China, a Central Business District is proposed with and from a mutant aesthetics which simultaneously seeks to coordinate itself with predominant cycles of Chinese production, while purporting a new energy-driven materialism which underscores architecture as an intersection of matter and energy. Form is articulated to maintain a commitment to calibrated porosities and the optimization of potential energy inflows.

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Zero-carbon sustainability is challenged for its myopic propensity to reject the proliferation of energy and matter (its consumption and production) as processes of industrialization at odds with ecology. In contrast, the processes of Chinese urbanization is embraced and celebrated for its voracity, health, and rudeness.  Technology’s historical drive to control nature as a means towards surplus and profit is recast as a method for guiding China’s emerging emergy regime through its current period of growth and into a steady-state economic and industrial maturity. Architecture as a tool of intelligence is exercised to manage China’s pulsing cycles; devices of ambiguous scale which metabolize the tumultuous economic prosperity and crystallize into architecturally specific but programmatically indeterminate domains; articulated generic sublimes for both current and future generations.

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Obsolescence itself is rendered obsolete through precise spatial ambiguities and robust flexibility. Like a tree, the city is found useful. Like all systems of growth, it will reach maximum carrying capacity and decline -- a project in emergy investment during a rapid period of growth is inevitably a project in managing with intelligence broader scopes and cycles of energy pulsing (years, decades, centuries, millennia). The Flimsy and the Fortified is positioned at the hinge between the denouement of rapid urbanization of in Europe and America, and the rising (but apparently sputtering) action of development in China. It attempts to didactically unpack the protocols established between Modernity’s various scales of urbanization and reconcile their potential or lack thereof in the unstable but voracious terrain of Chinese urbanization.

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Architecture is engaged as a category in conflict with existing Chinese development protocols. This project challenges the current predominant logics of subdivision, and regards their geometries as suspicious as complicit with the functioning of all those facets of capital (property ownership, resource extraction, and land speculation) which erode quality in the national production of architecture. As a measure towards maintaining GDP growth rates, current Chinese policy--equipped with swift, centralized operatively and an urban ideology founded on consumer economics--accelerates relocation mechanisms with the ambition of pushing 250,000,000 people from the farm to the city in the next dozen years. Unequipped to manage these rates of inflow, architecture is marginalized by a building industry ethics which prioritize techniques of repetition as an imperatives towards correct economic functioning and political well-being. This project challenges typological assumptions and inverts their criteria along thermodynamic lines: types as we know them are complexities and cross-bred, looped, nested and bundled -- new logics of aggregation and automated organizations which have the capacity to maintain quality while absorbing the demands and of nearly one-quarter of one billion involuntary urban refugees. The proposal engages architecture as a category in conflict with existing Chinese development protocols. As a subject with deep and varied history in Modernity, the tensions between the form of the building and the form of the city unfold in the 20th century metropolis as a negotiation of subdivision logics driven by property ownership, resource extraction, and land speculation: the region, the city, the district, the block, the building, and the unit establish a normative unit hierarchy immanent in the functioning of Capitalist development.

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Casting a critical eye upon 20th century urbanization patterns as the de facto prototypes for Chinese urbanization, this proposal is positioned along that lineage as its momentum hinges into China and accelerates towards an unprecedented scale, its processes amplifying, complexifying and differentiating along the contours of China’s unique economic landscape.

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New energy-driven protocols are developed which behave opportunistically within the existing dynamics of development. Typological assumptions are complexified and cross-bred, looped, nested and bundled -- new logics of aggregation and automated organizations which have the capacity to maintain quality while absorbing the demands and of nearly one-quarter of one billion involuntary urban refugees.

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As a measure towards maintaining GDP growth rates, current Chinese policy--equipped with swift, centralized operativity and an urban ideology founded on consumer economics--accelerates relocation mechanisms with the ambition of pushing 250,000,000 people from the farm to the city in the next dozen years. Unequipped to manage these rates of inflow, Architecture is marginalized by a building industry ethics which prioritize techniques of repetition as an imperatives towards correct economic functioning and political well-being. Articulated as a semi-autonomous, open-system entity, the “conglomerate” is considered as both an object and an operation which obfuscates existing logics of subdivision in a productive way, problematizing conventional scale hierarchies into more sophisticated and locally optimized nests and loops.

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Neither ideological, nor ethical, the project seeks to unfold out of the aesthetics of thermodynamic materialism an alternative set of energy-driven city-making protocols for development in China. The ethical is understood as the ritual repetition of an ideology subjugated to the mechanisms of total economic rationalization -- its forms nothing more than the beating of its drum on the rise and fall of capital’s organic composition. Taking the destruction immanent in capitalist creation as the basis for a skepticism in any ethical rationalization of its processes, a contrary emphasis is placed on the richness that lies within the limits of Modern ideology--its political functioning, regulatory mechanisms, modalities of engaging crisis--on the one hand, and the limits its ethics--its reflexivity, modes of repetition, shortcomings in criticality--on the other.

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Aesthetics come to play a privileged role in this search for critical practice, suspended in between the ideological-ethical spectrum, yet capable of polarizing to reinforce one or the other, as a sort of elastic free agent. Investigating the real bases of the interrelationships of these components and articulating their significance is the imperative of the architect: an action that is more elaborated than ethical technique and more articulated within situational particularities than the purely ideological, critical practice motivated by purposeful desire towards meaningful impacts and outcomes.