Architecture and the Landscape of Modernity in China Before 1949

No country in the world was more variously exploited by foreign powers in the early-twentieth century than China. This book argues that China’s encounter with modernity was mediated multifariously and dominated by contact with Western powers and through contact with an Eastern power, Japan and examines China’s encounter with architecture and modernity. For a country that had the longest continuous building traditions in the world, spanning four millennia, the encounter the modern materials and practices that the colonisers brought was acute. While focusing on this period, the book also expands current knowledge of the architectural practice in pre-communist China as well as acknowledging the recent urban development. The heterogeneous origin of modernity in China is what makes its experience unique and its architectural encounters distinctive. These are investigated through a re-evaluation of established knowledge of the subject and the inclusion of original archival and photographic material concentrating on Western influence through the Treaty Ports, the emergence of architecture as a profession in China, and Japan’s colonial activities in Manchuria. This book acknowledges the paradox presented by examining China using non-Chinese criteria and considers alternatives to the Westerncentricty that underlies existing approaches to non-Western topics. A multiple modernities approach not only questions the application of conventional theories of modernity or post-colonialism to the Chinese situation, but also offers a more effective way of comprehending the unique complexity of China’s encounter with architectural modernity.

Edward Denison is an architectural historian, writer and photographer. He teaches Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and has published numerous books, including: ‘Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria’ (HKUP, 2017), ‘Luke Him Sau, Architect: China’s Missing Modern’ (Wiley 2014), ‘The Life of the British Home - An Architectural History’ (Wiley, 2012), ‘McMorran & Whitby’ (RIBA, 2009), ‘Modernism in China - Architectural Visions and Revolutions’ (Wiley, 2008), ‘Building Shanghai - The Story of China’s Gateway’ (Wiley, 2006), and ‘Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City’ (Merrell, 2003).