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This book explores China's encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism - an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the west, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the west and, importantly, from the east.
List of contents
Part I: China and the Meaning of Modernity, 1. Introduction, 2. Intellectural Orientations: The Unavoidable Burden of Context, 3. China’s Multiple Modernities, 4. Chinese Art and its Multiple Modernities, Part II: Architecture and Modernity, 5. The Advent of Architecture, 6. Foreign Settlements before 1912, 7. Modernism and Nationalism, 8. Japan: China’s Mirror to Modernism, 9. Shanghai: Multiple Modernities’ Exemplar, 10. China's Multiple Modernities - A Project Curtailed
About the author
Edward Denison is an architectural historian and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His previous publications include: Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria (2017), Luke Him Sau, Architect (2014), The Life of the British Home (2012), McMorran & Whitby (2009), Modernism in China (2008), Building Shanghai (2006), and Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City (2003).
Summary
This book explores China’s encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism – an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the west, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the west and, importantly, from the east.