Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture: Social Production of Buildings and Spaces in History - Paperback

by Jianfei Zhu (Editor), Chen Wei (Editor), Li Hua (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

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, Director, 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), Walking Along the Grand Canal (2 vols, 2013) in Chinese.

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