Architecturalized Asia

Architecturalized Asia explores built environments and visual narratives in Asia via cartography, icons, and symbols in different historical settings. It grows out of a three-year project focusing on cultural exchange in the making of Asia’s boundaries as well as its architectural styles and achievements.

The book consists of three sections. In Mapping Asia: Architectural Symbols from Medieval to Early Modern Periods, authors examine icons and symbols in maps and textual descriptions and other early evidence about Asian architecture. The second section, Conjugating Asia: The Long-Nineteenth Century and Its Impetus, explores the construction of the field of Asian architecture and the political imagination of Asian built environments in the nineteenth century. The third section, Manifesting Asia: Building the Continent with Architecture, addresses the physical realization of “Asian” geographic ideas within a set of specific local and regional contexts in the twentieth century.

Regions and conditions covered in Architecturalized Asia include French Indochina, Iran, post-Soviet Central Asia, Japanese landscape, and the construction of the Afro-Asian built environment.