Fun Mill: The Architecture of Creative Industry in Contemporary China looks closely on transforming existing real estate by promoting creative clusters, starting with specific architectures that are examined using an open-minded approach.
What are the economic, political, and design mechanisms used to build and legitimise them? What city concept is designed and built in these spaces? Can we identify recurrent features, general issues, and compositional orders and logic? The book discusses creative clusters as fertile ground for research and action involving the architectural and urban project and outlines several distinctive traits of professional and design practices in China in the last decade. In particular, the book focus on three recurrent methods used by architectural projects to reconfigure space—Collecting icons, Shifting scale, Bounding borders. These intervention methods were identified from a range of design experiences, richly illustrated with detailed drawings and photographs, including before and after views of the renovated spaces.