Asian Building Types: volume 2 (European and Asian Architecture)

This study of Asian architecture is an attempt to determine how its principal building types were designed and constructed, when and where these types originated, what influence they had in other areas, and to what extent they are characteristic of their building types. For historical context, comprehensive studies of the development of Asin building types are available, and I have relied to a large extent on them, but each of them is limited to one part of Asia, and I have tried to reconstruct the origins and diffusion of building types throughout Asia. The studies I have relied upon primarily are Liang Ssu-Ch’ing’s Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: a Study of the Development of its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types (1984); James Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1910); and K. A. C. Creswell’s Early Muslim Architecture: Early ‘Abbāsids: Umayyads of Cordova; Aghlabids, Tūlūnids, and Samānids; A. D. 752-905 (1940). Where my work differs from theirs is mainly by considering fewer works in greater detail to make more wide-ranging comparisons. Like these authors, I have personally examined nearly all buildings I have written about and read all relevant primary sources I could obtain. I have tried to determine specifically what architects had to know in order to create great buildings and what builders had to know to construct permanent buildings. I have also tried to account for all of the most directly relevant information rather than using evidence selectively to support a theory. My objective has been to make more readily available information that is needed to create similarly well designed and constructed buildings. I have previously used essentially the same approach for writing about architectural history and ethnohistory as a means of dealing with otherwise unmanageable amounts of information to determine what is most worth knowing. In many cases, surviving buildings are the best sources of information for determining how they were designed and constructed and or reconstructing how they originally looked, but in the case of cultures that have not survived intact, the most comprehensive and least biased accounts of them reveal the most about how all aspects of their ways of lives were interrelated. Changes in buildings are often more easily distinguished than acculturation, and the buildings themselves must sometimes be more relied upon when only meagre documentation is available.I begin and end this study with secular building types to emphasize that the major religions of Asia are of recent origin. For example, Chinese palaces were being constructed a thousand or more years before any of the world’s major religions were created. China has always had a secular culture and has never had a state religion; its ancestors were revered and its emperors were obeyed rather than worshipped. For the same reason, I discuss the building types of China before considering the building types of India and why I consider the secular building types of these geographical areas before considering the building types that were much later created or adapted by Islam. Read more