The comfort of tradition: the Chinese garden in contemporary landscape architecture projects

The essay discusses the contemporary reinterpretations of the Chinese garden as a historical typology and focuses on two different approaches: while outside China, the tendency has been to replicate the aesthetic forms of the past and its stylistic features and formal elements, albeit in simplified forms, inside the country the spatial mechanism of historical gardens was reinterpreted according to a contemporary design language and informed the production of new open spaces. The essay explores both the role of diasporic communities, suspended between the desire to assert their identity in their new countries and ties to their native culture, and the political use of Chinese culture as a means to developing strategies to reposition the country on the international scene.