How to better integrate urban texture, architecture, and culture organically, and use the architecture as a carrier to transmit more humanistic information? In today's society, people have a variety of ways to explore the culture and understand the culture. However, the most direct experience is a personal experience. As the most important carrier of human activities, architecture cannot be overlooked. From the direct sensory experience and indirect behavioral patterns, architecture is involved in human activities and ways of thinking all the time. Therefore, the combination of culture and architecture organically will give people a better way and angle to understand the culture. The relationship between local culture and local architecture is inextricably linked. However, how to integrate foreign culture into local architecture will be a very difficult problem. Directly transplanting buildings and cultural elements from a foreign culture to a local city will make the building incompatible with the original urban texture. It is not easy for local residents to accept this foreign culture from the aesthetic perspective or psychological perspective. In my thesis, I hope to design a cultural center that can match the texture of the local city and reflect the foreign culture through my thinking about the architecture and the understanding of the foreign culture: design a Chinese cultural center in Chinatown, Washington DC, to find out a reasonable way for cultural communication.

With the convenience of information dissemination and the rapid trend of globalization, the distance between people has gradually shortened. However, the way to bring human distance closer together must be the deeper understanding and mutual recognition of each other. As the most important carrier of human activities, architecture's ability to transmit cultural information is obvious. However, designing a foreign cultural center to enhance cultural communication based on the local urban environment requires consideration of more factors. Foreign buildings contain foreign cultures that make them unsuitable for being displayed too directly in the local urban environment. Therefore, how to deal with the relationship between foreign culture and local architecture more reasonably is the crucial part. It is necessary to consider the local architectural environment as well as think about the deep content of the foreign culture both in the design of the building and the site. This project will provide an opportunity to transform this conflict and contradiction to better integrate the site, architecture, and culture.

Master of Architecture