Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture: Social Production of Buildings and Spaces in History
ISBN: 9781315851112
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited

This handbook, representing the collaboration of 40 scholars, provides a multi-faceted exploration of roughly 6,000 years of Chinese architecture, from ancient times to the present.

This volume combines a broad-spectrum approach with a thematic framework for investigating Chinese architecture, integrating previously fragmented topics and combining the scholarship of all major periods of Chinese history. By organizing its approach into five parts, this handbook:

* Traces the practices and traditions of ancient China from imperial authority to folk culture.
* Unveils a rich picture of early modern and republican China, revealing that modernization was already beginning to emerge.
* Describes the social, intellectual, ideological, and formal enterprises of socialist architecture.
* Frames a window on a complex and changing contemporary China by focusing on autonomy, state practices, and geopolitics of design, ultimately identifying its still evolving position on the world stage.
* Examines the existing cultural and political theories to highlight potential avenues for future transformations in Chinese architecture that also retain Chinese identity.

Providing a pioneering combination of ancient and modern Chinese architecture in one coherent study, this book is a must-read for scholars, students, and educators of Chinese architecture, architectural history and theory, and the architecture of Asia.

Jianfei Zhu is Professor of East Asian Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, author of Chinese Spatial Strategies (2004) and Architecture of Modern China (2009) with Routledge, as well as Forms and Politics (2018), and works on space, power, visuality, and geopolitics with a Chinese focus.

Chen Wei is Professor and Director at the History and Theory Research Institute, Southeast University, China, eminent historian and architect on literati gardens and author of Private Gardens (1999), Collected Works of Chen Wei (2015), Ornament of Jiangnan (2016), and Walking Along the Grand Canal (2 vols, 2013) in Chinese.

Li Hua is Professor and Deputy Director at the History and Theory Research Institute, Southeast University, China, author of "'Composition' and Regularization of Architectural Production in Contemporary China" (2010) and other papers in China's top journal Jianzhu Xuebao , and Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual AS series on architectural theory.