Spatial Habitus. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014, c2013. xv, 301 pp., [24 pp.] col. plates (Figures.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3952-9.
Architecturalized Asia is an ambitious volume of visionary scholarship that both demonstrates architectural history’s important place in the study of Asia and makes it accessible as a method of analysis to those of us outside the discipline. “Architecturalized,” which Yuming He handily describes as to be “designed, codified, and structured” (67), is a productive motif that underscores the making of “Asia” through thought and practice, and that seeks to interrogate that process of construction. It also refers to the object of study: “Asia” is to be examined through its “architecture”—here writ large to encompass not only individual buildings, but also the built environment and its representations in cartography. Underscoring the particular power that physical structures and their representations possess, the essays in this volume use them as lenses to investigate how Asia has taken shape over time.
This collection is motivated by a desire to emancipate the study of architecture in Asia from its domination by “a dialectical relationship between Europe and Asia” (8). While each of the essays gives due credit to the important role that Europe and European regimes of knowledge have played in the emergence and study of Asian architecture, they also identify a need to give an account of Asian architecture that neither reduces it to that relationship, nor always returns to it in the final analytical instance. The essays successfully offer different ways out of this bind, whether by demonstrating how, as Caroline Herbelin does, architects both local and foreign actively broke away from Orientalist conceptualizations of Asia to pursue architectural styles more appropriate to local conditions, or when Ken Tadashi Oshima shows that imaginations of Asia outside of Asia offered refreshing new ways to think about the region that departed from Orientalism’s desire to exoticize and subjugate. The emancipatory impulse is also at work in more elemental ways, as in David Efurd’s contribution, which offers a correction to misunderstandings that have resulted from reading South Asian Buddhist architecture through the lens of European religious architecture.
The attempt to interrogate the dominance of the nation-state and national styles as frames for examining Asian architecture is another theme that runs through the volume, and is especially marked in its first section on the medieval and early modern period. Vimalin Rujivacharakul’s examination of how architecture became linked to geographical and geopolitical space within the field of world architecture (Rujivacharakul identifies the emergence of “architectural narration” as a key moment in this process) sets the tone for the volume as a whole. By emphasizing a dynamic exchange of ideas, influences, and practices that transcended national borders, many of the essays not only illustrate the limitations of national frames for understanding the emergence of “Asian architecture” historically, they also—as in Imran bin Tajudeen’s essay on the inability of extant categories of Asian architecture to adequately account for Javanese architectural forms—highlight how national frames are in some cases unable even to produce accurate knowledge. At the same time, these interrogations of national frameworks stands in interesting tension with essays in the last section of the volume that examine architecture’s contribution to regional identity formation, which suggests that despite their limits as ways of ordering knowledge, architectural styles as representations of group identity are still politically powerful and useful.
The volume’s emphasis on the dynamic transmission of ideas across cultural, geographical, and temporal (as Seng Kuan demonstrates in his essay on the continuities between Japanese plans for their prewar colony in Manchuria and postwar Tokyo Bay) space prompts rethinking about the relationship between knowledge regimes, especially if the transmission takes place within asymmetrical power relations. Many of the essays illustrate the permeability between dualities like colonizer/colonized, West/non-West, or Asia/non-Asia and ask us to consider the multiple directionalities through which power and knowledge flowed. In so doing, an important question emerges: what happens to the political valences that accompanied these ideas in their “original” form—the Orientalist dimensions of imaginations of Asia formed during the age of high imperialism; the centralized power of the Soviet state implicit in Soviet-style functionalism; the colonial dimensions of Japan’s urban planning in Manchuria—when they are transmitted across space and time? Do these political significances, so crucial to their emergence, continue to inhere in the ideas or are they neutralized or transformed in some way through their transmission?
Among this volume’s successes is its offer of a refreshingly inclusive idea of “Asia” in time (from the medieval period to the present) and space (encompassing East, Southeast and South Asia, but also the Pacific Rim, Central Asia and Iran). This not only decentres the region away from its conventional geographical centres and raises the question of where Asia “is,” it also opens up the possibility of imagining other configurations of and within Asia itself. Peter Christensen’s tracing of Eurasia’s short-lived career as a “hitherto unimagined cultural contiguity” (105) illustrates this expansive geographical imagination especially powerfully. The fact that a region was—even if only for a moment—conceptualized in such a way that transcended national boundaries and national agendas is an intriguing prospect for our own, highly fragmented present in which political issues between individual countries threaten to exacerbate the fragmentation of Asia even further.
Tze M. Loo
University of Richmond, Richmond, USA
pp. 683-685