The theme in debate is vast but urgent. With the termination of the period known as the International Style, today the debate centres on globalisation. With Asia , more than any other Continent in the world, also having in its socio-political agenda, there is the task of ethnocentric self-affirmation of its post-colonial socio-culture. Countries or Regions such as India , Malaysia , Singapore , the Hong Kong SAR and the Macao SAR, with a lengthy multi-racial multiracial experience, combine, with their economic successes, forms of education and of affirmation of their own local or national identity, without imitating Western models, nor in any small way, accepting impositions that emanate from the past colonial period. To learn from the West or from other sensibilities of universal merit, is not purely and simply to copy them, but yes, to re-discover them in their own substance, in the socio-cultural and politico-historical cloth of each of those nations and localities. And if this dynamic process involves all sectors of the life of man, architecture and urbanism are not exceptions. It is in this sense that The Architects Association of Macau (AAM) is organising ACA 11, the11 th Asian Congress of Architects, in Macao, in November 2004, under the umbrella of the theme “Contemporary Architectural Culture – The Architectural and Urban Identity of the Cities of Asia”.
The richest cultural values of Asia can be, and must be, assimilated in its contemporary architecture – as were the teachings of Vitruvius and of Palladio in western architecture -- without any kind of complexes, whilst the contributions of Asia to contemporary life in the World, in the last half of the past century and into the present, have been enormous, and for which it is now being respected for its own diverse identities.
MACAU ACA 11
Main Theme
Contemporary Architectural Culture
Contemporary Architectural Culture
- The Architectural and Urban Identity of the Asian Cities
