Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture by Zhu, Jianfei; Wei, Chen; Hua, Li;

Short description:

This handbook, representing the collaboration of 41 scholars, provides a multi-faceted exploration of roughly 6,000 years of Chinese architecture, from ancient times to the present.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1. Reassembling for a Chinese Architecture: Notes for a New Departure  PART I: ANCIENT AND DYNASTIC TRADITION State Governance Over Building and City Planning  2. The Chinese City in the Service of the State  3. Typical Design Features of Ming Palaces and Altars in Beijing  4. Imperial Cities: Critical Changes in Urban Paradigm from Sui-Tang to Song  5. Yingzao Fashi: The Book and Methodical Issues for Studying It  Literati Culture and Social Production  6. Literati Gardens of the Jiangnan Region: Characters and Mutations  7. Cang Lang Pavilion of Suzhou: Sentiment, Scenery, Aura, and Meaning  8. Landscape Urbanism: Urban–Rural Relations in Hangzhou of Southern Song China  9. Confucian Authority: Analysis of School-Temples at Imperial Academy of Beijing  Folk Culture and Vernacular Practice  10. Fengshui Practice and Urban Development in Ancient China: An Outline  11. Yang Yunsong and the Jiangxi School of Fengshui Practice in Southern China  12. Carpentry In Vernacular Building Practice: The Master’s Way  13. Vernacular Architecture: Themes and Variations Over a Large Country.  PART II: REPUBLICAN AND EARLY MODERN TRANSFORMATION The Arrival of “Architecture”: Profession, Knowledge, and Education  14. Emergence of “Architecture”: In the Reform Years of Late Qing Dynasty  15. The Architect as a Profession in Republican China: Rising Under the State  Modern Building Practice: Style and Technology  16. Building Technology in Republican China and Its Historical Legacies  17. Chinese Classical Revival: Nanjing, Capital of Republican China (1910s–40s)  Modern City Construction and Spatial Formation  18. From Hankou Town to Greater Wuhan: Urban Spatial Organizations in Early Modern China  19. Modern Edutainment Space: Public Parks in Early Twentieth-Century China  PART III: SOCIALIST-MAOIST MODERNIZATION Spatial Construction and City Planning Under Socialist Ideology  20. Socialist Urban Planning in Mao’s China (1949–1976) 21 Danwei and Socialist Urbanism  Practice, Education, and Knowledge Production  22. The Design Institute in Mao’s China (1950s–70s)  23. Architectural Education in China (1950s–1980s): Constructing and Deconstructing  24. Theories of Spatial Composition: Design Knowledge in China up to the 1980s  25. Liang and Liu: Strategies for Writing an Architectural History in the 1950s  Architecture in Socialist China: Nationalism and Modernism  26. National Style: Thinking and Building for a New Republic in Beijing (1949–1959)  27. Towards a Regional Modernism in Chinese Architecture (1930s–70s)  28. For a Modernism: Huang and Feng at Shanghai’s Tongji Architectural Programme  29. Building Canton Fair: Towards a Regional Modernism in Southern China (1950s–1980s)  PART IV: CONTEMPORARY HISTORIES: CHINA IN THE WORLD Architects and the Issue of Autonomy  30. Critical Pragmatism: Architects as Refl exive Individuals in Contemporary China  31. Architects as Authoring Individuals: Y. H. Chang, Liu Jiakun, and Wang Shu  State Design Institutes in the Reform Era  32. From Mao to Market: Evolution of the State Design Institutes in China  33. The Chinese Design Institute: A Critique of “Critical Thinking” CBDs: Global Spectacles  34. Objects in Territories Along Avenues: Spatial Planning in Beijing and Shanghai  35. Iconic Architecture in China (2000s): Historical Reading or Marxist Critique  36. Urban–Rural Development in China and a Way Forward With “New Urbanization”  Geopolitical Differentiations  37. “Chinese Cultural Renaissance” and a Chinese Neoclassicism: Taiwan (1960s–80s)  38. Architects as Reflexive Individuals: Taiwan and Hong Kong Since the 1950s  PART V: THEORIZATION Culture and Epistemology  39. Ten Lamps of Architecture in Chinese Culture  40. Deriving Architectural Theory From Chinese Philosophy: ThinkingWith Xunzi  41. Figuration: Writing, Memory, and Cities in Chinese Culture  42. Signs of Empire: Scale and Statehood in Chinese Culture  Political Ethics  43. The State Function of Architecture  44. Political Space and Moral Statehood  Methodology  45. Studies on Architecture of Ancient China: As in Part I  46. Perspectives on Architecture of (Modern) China: As in Parts II–V and Part I Appendix Timeline: Chinese History