Ricerc@Sapienza

Recent political and economical instability in the Middle East has revealed the fragility of the artistic and architectural heritage of cities. As in Europe following the Second World War, the systematic destruction of architectural heritage is sadly now common practice in territories afflicted by armed conflict. These circumstances push the architectural discipline to question how to reconstruct the architecture of the city.

From the early 90s several Chinese cities engaged transformation embodying
in architecture, public space and urban texture, the physical evidence of the
expectations and contradictions originated and breed by the reforms initiated in
the late 1970s. The idea and the meaning of cultural heritage has been evolving
since then in Chinese architectural culture through central government reforms
and private initiatives managing the reconstruction of national identity within a