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Volume 13.1

BEIJING’S PRESERVATION POLICY AND THE FATE OF THE SIHEYUAN
Daniel Abramson
This close study of the policies and practices currently at play in the preservation and transformation of vernacular courtyard housing in Beijing reveals some of the sharpest social and political problems facing Chinese urban planning in this era of economic reform and the newly emerging land market. In addition to expressing the conflict between modernization and preservation that is common throughout the world, recent attempts to restore or mimic traditional dwellings expose deep contractions about Beijing’s accelerated developmental program — contradictions exacerbated by the particular architectural form of these dwellings, the siheyuan.

DIALOGUES OF ARCHITECTURAL PRESERVATION IN MODERN VIETNAM: THE 36 STREETS COMMERCIAL QUARTER
Alexandra Sauvegrain
This article examines the significance of dialogues present in the safeguarding of a particular urban site: the “36 Commercial Streets Quarter” in Hanoi, Vietnam. These dialogues expose both the contemporary needs of local inhabitants and the agenda of the government with regard to architectural preservation. Similarly, the dialogues allow for residents of this historical quarter to react to and contest the preservation practices being used on site. This contrast between the views of the government and of local residents reveals how various notions of architectural preservation — in particular, an indigenous sense of preservation and the colonial influence present in the “modern” practice of preserving the past — depict the true nature of Vietnamese culture in its postcolonial state.

VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE AND THE PARK REMOVALS: TRADITIONALIZATION AS JUSTIFICATION AND RESISTANCE
Michael Ann Williams
The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, authorized in 1926, entailed the largest removal of a local population for a park in United States history. After an early policy change that halted the wholesale elimination of the cultural landscape, the National Park Service used the preservation of traditional culture as an implicit justification for the park’s creation. In contrast, the families of those removed sought new meanings in the remnants of the cultural landscape within the park and established new rituals that celebrated an alternate interpretation of the selectively edited landscape.

INDIANIZING INDIAN ARCHITECTURE: A POSTMODERN TRADITION
Ritu Bhatt
Since the 1980s a tendency to Indianize architecture has emerged in the works of prominent architectural practitioners in India. What makes this development postmodern as well as distinctly Indian is the rhetoric of mythical symbolism that has accompanied it. In this article I analyze two architectural productions: Vistara, a catalogue for the Festival of India; and the Jawahar Kala Kendra, the Center for the Arts and Crafts, Jaipur, by architect Charles Correa. Both productions have been very popular, and it is useful to take a closer critical look at them, not so much to find faults, but to reveal some of the latent biases and assumptions such cultural productions engender.

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VILLAGE’: FOLK CULTURE AND TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN AN ALPINE CONTEXT
Gabriela Muri
Tourism has become one of the most important systems for transmitting culture worldwide. Its history also indicates a successful custom of transmitting tradition. According to the Guinness Book of Records, “the world’s smallest village” lies in Austria. A self-styled tourist attraction, it unites the most important characteristics of a structure of symbols selectively prepared in alpine regions to transmit standardized representations of a traditional hometown ethos. This article seeks to show how such representations were derived from folk culture, but were refunctionalized through historic processes of European tourism development. “The world’s smallest village” thus serves as a case example illustrating the processes of global mass tourism.