China's Old Dwellings. By Ronald G. Knapp. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000. i-xi+363 pp. Hard cover $70.00, ISBN 0-8248-2075-4; paperback $44.95, ISBN 0-8248-2214-5.]

Extract

In many areas of China, the transformation of the built environment under reform is claiming traditional buildings to create new space for industrial development. The rapidity of growth, urged by the state, characteristically imposes new order on the landscape and reorders the places built by people motivated by different chronological logics, of seasonality, ritual, and the human lifepath. As if just in time to testify on behalf of endangered traditional landscapes, Ronald Knapp has produced China's Old Dwellings, which provides unprecedented coverage of the design and distinctive structural characteristics of regional housing forms.