Architectures That Animate Landscapes: Rethinking Critical Regionalism Through I.M. Pei’s East-West Projects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical regionalism highlights a central paradox between the advancement of universal civilization and the value of local culture. The question posed for architectural practice is how the globalized approach can come to terms with the particularity of the region. This article suggests that global architecture must uncover “regionality” from within the “landscape.” This idea can be unpacked by looking at two contemporaneous projects by I.M. Pei in relation to their associated landscape traditions – the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing and the pyramids of the Louvre in Paris. Distinct technological approaches (vernacular versus prefabricated) and architectural languages (mimetic versus autonomous) activate the dialectical interplay between the universal and particular in each project. Each project also interacts with the natural and cultural factors in the close and far horizons, establishing a set of relations (integration versus intervention) within their landscapes. By interrogating “potential regionality in landscapes,” this article proposes the extension of “critical regionalism” to “landscape regionalism.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".