A new kind of analysis of the most famous work in the history of Chinese architecture, Jiren Feng's book will be important for students of Chinese architecture, and useful for readers in pre-modern Chinese history, craft, and literature. The author is an architectural historian trained in both China and the US, a former research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and a professor of the Chinese language (U. of Hawai'i at Hilo). He has a distinguished record of teaching and research on several continents. In this book, he looks philologically at the Yingzao Fashi building manual, a Song Dynasty document that is the core book of pre-modern Chinese architecture. He discovers a specific technical language for talking about building elements using metaphors based on growing plants: support brackets are flowers, a building is a flowering tree. Tracing the use of this language, Feng carefully argues that intellectuals, artists, writers, builders, and crafters shared a vocabulary for talking together and a single way of thinking about buildings and the relationship between people and the environment, products and materials, culture and nature. As both cause and effect, the Song Dynasty was a time of great literary production and innovation, increased respect for craft labor among upper-class intellectuals, and growing intellectual knowledge and literary interests among working class people. Feng also argues that in Chinese architecture, it is artificial and inaccurate to separate the study of language from buildings and metaphors from materials. The book is sparely but carefully illustrated with black and white photographs and diagrams, many historical. There are seven appendices: previous scholarship on the Yingzao Fashi, named architectural types and structural elements in related texts, entries on architecture in the Taiping Yulan, comparisons of architectural terminology, and literary classics and historical sources cited in the Yingzao Fashi. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
