Discovering China: A Journal By A Chinese Adoptee

An American adopted as a baby from China and raised in Illinois, Judith traveled to China on a tour customized for a group of such adoptees along with her mother and fellow adoptee sister. Anticipating a transformative experience, Judith set out to examine how these very personal encounters could be recorded, analyzed, and perhaps mediated through an architectural framework. The aim, rather than a study of the building form and fabric, was to articulate the architecture of the experience - as both an inner narrative and an external landscape of places, actions, and events. It was ambitious and risky, namely because the degree of personal and emotional turbulence such a journey might evoke was unpredictable.



The result is a collection of thoughts, artifacts, images - a staccato rhythm of elements of calm and turmoil, beauty and exposition, capture and release. Perhaps one's history is as unknowable, ungraspable, and inconclusive as any place.