From The "concessions" To The Customs Area "

China's contemporary historical concession areas, and their architecture, are the products of a specific historical period. Not only are they the imprint of "fascist" politics, economics, and military aggression, at the same time they hold within them architectural aesthetics, modern Western lifestyles, social stratification, and other layers of cultural significance. At different social historical periods, for people with different backgrounds, the cultural symbolism of this type of architecture and space was quite different. Moreover, to a certain specific group, the meanings underwent transformation. This essay attempts to look back 100 years to the many various memories of different people, during different periods, regarding the Italian Concession in Tianjin, and by looking at the currently ongoing Italian Business Park reconstruction project, to discuss the different types of outward, as well as hidden, cultural symbols that are embodied within the space and architecture of China's concession areas, as well as the practicality and possibility of mutual exchange between them, and thus in this way analyzing the relationship between the mutual effects and impact of power, discourse, advantage, and function between people, society, government and space. The multiple cultural meanings of architecture and space and the basis for realizing this kind of semantic transformation, and the change in social time and space are the force behind transformation. Thus, not only is the agency of people the required prerequisite for the creation of this type of cultural multivocalism, it also provides the necessary means for mutual transformation. It is exactly this type of transformation of multiple cultural meanings that determines the life or death of a city and its architecture.