Description
Book SynopsisWhat is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology, and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artifact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.
Trade ReviewThis collection opens the field of architectural history of the modern and will enrich specialists’ way of seeing. It shows how modern architecture could be differently understood, challenged, transformed, and owned. It capably represents a break, but not a retreat from influential architectural history and theory."" - Abidin Kusno, Professor, York Centre for Asian Research and Director, Centre for Southeast Asia, University of British Columbia, Canada
