Ching Francis D. K. - A Global History of Architecture

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Ching, Francis D. K., 1943- author. | Jarzombek, Mark, author. |

Prakash, Vikramaditya, author.

Title: A global history of architecture / Francis D.K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek,

Vikramaditya Prakash.

Description: Third edition. | Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, 2017. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017004046 (print) | LCCN 2017005382 (ebook) | ISBN

9781118981337 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118981610 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN

9781118981603 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--History. | BISAC: ARCHITECTURE / History /

General.

Classification: LCC NA200 .C493 2017 (print) | LCC NA200 (ebook) | DDC

720.9--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004046

Printed in the United States of America

10987654321

What is a global history of architecture? There is, of course, no single answer, just as there is no single way to define words like global, history, and architecture. Nonetheless, these words are not completely open-ended, and they serve here as the vectors that have helped us construct the narratives of this volume. With this book, we hope to provoke discussion about these terms and at the same time furnish a framework students can use to begin discussion in the classroom.

This book transcends the necessary restrictions of the classroom, where in a semester or even two, the teacher has to limit what is taught based on any number of factors. The reader should understand that there is always something over the horizon. Whereas any such book must inevitably be selective about what it can include, we have attempted to represent a wide swath of the globe, in all its diversity. At the same time,however, the book does not aspire to be an encyclopedia of everything that has been built; nor does it assume a universal principle that governs everything architectural. The buildings included are for us more than just monuments of achievement; we see them as set pieces allowing us to better appreciate the complex intertwining of social, political, religious, and economic contexts in which they are positioned. As much as possible, we emphasize urban contexts as well as materials and surfaces. We have also tried to emphasize quality as much as quantity. From that point of view, the word global in the title is not so much a geographic construct as an eruditional horizon. In that sense, this book is not about the sum of all local histories. Its mission is bound to the discipline of architecture, which requires us to see connections, tensions, and associations that transcend so-called local perspectives. In that respect, ours is only one of many possible narratives.

Synchrony has served as a powerful frame for our discussion. For instance, as much as Seouls Gyeongbok Palace is today heralded in Korea as an example of traditional Korean architecture, we note that it also belongs to a Eurasian building campaign that stretched from Japan (the Katsura Imperial Villa), through China (Beijing and the Ming Tombs), to Persia (Isfahan), India (the Taj Mahal), Turkey (the Suleymaniye Complex), Italy (St. Peters Basilica and the Villa Rotonda), France (Chambord), and Russia (Cathedral of the Assumption). In some cases, one can assume that information flowed from place to place, but such movement is not itself a requirement for the architecture to qualify as global. It is enough for us to know, first, that these structures are contemporaneous and that each has a specific history. If there are additional connections that come as a result of trade, war, or other forms of contact, these are for us subsidiary to contemporaneity.

This is not to say that our story is exclusively the story of individual buildings and sites, only that there is a give and take between explaining how a building works and how it is positioned in the world of its influences and connections. We have, therefore, tried to be faithful to the specificities of each individual building while acknowledging that every architectural project is always embedded in a larger worldand even a worldviewthat affects it directly and indirectly.

Our post-19th-century penchant for seeing history through the lens of the nation-state often makes it difficult to apprehend such global pictures. Furthermore, in the face of todays increasingly hegemonic global economy, the tendency by historians, and often architects, to nationalize, localize, regionalize, and even micro-regionalize historyperhaps as meaningful acts of resistancecan blind us to the historical synchronicity and interconnectivity of global realities that existed long before our present moment of globalization. What would the Turks be today if they had stayed in East Asia? The movement of people, ideas, food, and wealth has bound us to each other since the beginning of history. And so without denying the reality of nation-states and their claims to unique histories and identities, we have resisted the temptation to streamline our narratives to fit nationalistic parameters. Indian architecture, for instance, may have some consistent traits from its beginnings to the present day, but there is less certainty about what those traits might be than one may think. The flow of Indian Buddhism to China, the opening of trade to Southeast Asia, the settling of Mongolians in the north, the arrival of Islam from the east, and the colonization by the English are just some of the more obvious links that bind India, for better or worse, to global events. It is these links, and the resultant architecture, more than the presumed Indianness of Indian architecture, that interests us. Furthermore, India has historically been divided into numerous kingdoms that, like Europe, could easily have evolved (and in some cases did evolve) into their own nations. The 10th-century Chola dynasty of peninsular India, for example, was not only an empire but possessed a unique worldview of its own. In writing its history, we have attempted to preserve its distinct identity while marking the ways in which it maps its own global imagination.