Asia's old dwellings: tradition, resilience and change: resistance in losing battle - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2004 by Robert Powell

Edited by Ronald Knapp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]22.50

This book is a collection of 18 essays on the old dwellings of Asia edited by Ronald Knapp, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the State University of New York. The essays are the individual or collaborative work of 21 academics from a variety of disciplines, mainly geographers. Seven of the contributors are based in the US, five in Australia, four in Hong Kong, and one each in Korea, Philippines and Indonesia. The diversity of disciplines represented and the cultural background of the writers is both a strength and a weakness of the book. The strength is that each writer has a close affinity with the specific culture they are writing about. The weakness is that the scope, methodology and focus of the essays vary widely so that for example there are essays on Indian, Chinese and Indonesian dwellings that attempt to cover the whole of these huge countries and by contrast essays on Singapore and Sri Lanka that deal with a specific typology like the Singapore row house or 'shop-house' and the Sinhala House to the exclusion of other typologies in those two countries.

Thus the reader has to jump from the general to the specific and both can be frustrating. More detail than can be conveyed in the broad overview of the Indian sub-continent is needed, but equally the focus of some of the case studies is sometimes restricted. Most authors bemoan the fact that traditional houses are everywhere beleaguered and under assault from the market economy, rapid urbanization, and declining craft skills. At their best, the essays offer a glimmer of hope for the incorporation of tradition within modernity, but almost all authors portray a losing battle in some isolated pockets of resistance.

Some essays are exemplary. For instance, Marc Askew writing on Ban Thai is informative and gives a particularly critical review of the commodification of tradition in the so-called 'Thai Style' publications, in state-promoted evocation of Thai traditional culture and in the burgeoning commercialized nostalgia industry. But the book does not offer any concrete ideas on the question that is at the core of architectural practice in many parts of Asia ie how to synthesize tradition and modernity--yet that was clearly never the editor's intention.

The book is nevertheless a rich source of information and its 300 illustrations give endless pleasure. Probably not to be read at a single sitting the individual chapters are the starting point for further investigation.

Book reviews from this and recent issues of The Architectural Review can now be seen on our website at www.arplus.com and the books can be ordered online, many at special discount.