Temporality of Building

This book examines the role that time plays in the life of buildings, adopting a comparative study of this influence between European and Chinese traditions. Whilst issues of time in architecture have attracted increasing interest by academics in the West, challenging the dominant modernist precepts of space, there is little understanding of the subject in China and how these compare to historical and contemporary perspectives in Europe. A guiding premise of the investigation is that notions of building time require insight into how cultural habits commingle with natural rhythms, or what David Leatherbarrow calls “concurrency”.Rather than examining specific buildings, the first three chapters apply three key themes (language, ritual and heritage) as cultural lenses to reveal differences and similarities between the two traditions. Through these lenses, buildings, interiors and their exterior spaces (churches/cathedrals, temples, palaces, gardens and courtyard houses) are explored to demonstrate how building time involves particular situations/settings and their correlating relationships to past traditions. In the final chapter we consider notions of time in the context of contemporary buildings in Europe and China, drawing on the earlier historical investigations and addressing globalising influences.This book would be of interest to architects, architectural theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists.

Yun Gao is Reader in Architecture at the University of Huddersfield and a Chartered Architect of the Royal Institute of British Architects. She received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh on the architectural heritage in SW China. She is author of numerous refereed journal papers and edited book chapters, and a number of books including Architecture of Dai Nationality in Yunnan, China and Creative Villages in SW China, and has been a recipient of research grant awards such as a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and AHRC grants. She is the International Corresponding Editor for the Journal of Architecture (UK).Nicholas Temple is Senior Professor of Architectural History at London Metropolitan University and formerly Director of the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE). A graduate of Cambridge University (Magdalene College), he has served as head of the School of Architecture at the University of Lincoln and as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He has researched and published widely on the history and theory of architecture and the city, and was shortlisted for the International CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award in 2014 for his book Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II (Routledge, 2011).Jing Xiao is Associate Professor in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shenzhen University in China. He received a PhD from the University of Nottingham on the subject of the transformation of architectural knowledge via pictorial media in pre-modern China. He has written and published on pre-modern Chinese architectural history and modern urban and technical history of the metropolis. A chartered architect of the Royal Institute of British Architects and assistant Editor-in-chief for the World Architecture Review (China), Dr Xiao has received research grants from funding bodies such as the National Science Foundation of China and Harvard University/Getty Foundation.