Tag: Spatial Habitus

Although modernization in Korea started more than a century later than in the West, it has worked as a prominent ideology throughout the past century—in particular it has brought radical changes in Korean architecture and cities. Traditional structures and ways of life have been thoroughly uprooted in modernity’s continuous negation of the past. Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea, by Inha Jung, presents a comprehensive overview of architectural development and urbanization in Korea within the broad framework of modernization.

“Inha Jung has written a fine volume, full of very well informed accounts of events, insightful analyses of projects, and nuanced ideas about the unique flow of architectural and urban modernization in Korea. Jung is a mature scholar who delivers a well-balanced and original account that is both ambitious in scope and delivered in unencumbered and economical prose, with lavish documentation should one want to go further into particular aspects. It is a book that can easily be read and appreciated by people outside the field, in, say, cultural or Korean studies, as well as by those without disciplinary affiliation who are simply interested in Korea.” —Peter G. Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3585-9 / $42.00 (CLOTH)

When the Chinese Nationalist Party nominally reunified the country in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek and other party leaders insisted that Nanjing was better suited than Beijing to serve as its capital. For the next decade, until the Japanese invasion in 1937, Nanjing was the “model capital” of Nationalist China, the center of not just a new regime, but also a new modern outlook in a China destined to reclaim its place at the forefront of nations. Interesting parallels between China’s recent rise under the Post-Mao Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist era have brought increasing scholarly attention to the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937); however, study of Nanjing itself has been neglected. In China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing, Charles Musgrove brings the city back into the discussion of China’s modern development, focusing on how it was transformed from a factional capital with only regional influence into a symbol of nationhood—a city where newly forming ideals of citizenship were celebrated and contested on its streets and at its monuments.

“China’s Contested Capital provides a nuanced, holistic view of the political, spatial, and social dimensions of Nanjing as the Guomindang capital. The grandiose plans for the governmental complex and the strikingly novel architecture of individual buildings aimed to promote Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Three Principles of the People,’ and the ROC’s governmental structure as modernist templates to the rest of the world. Musgrove’s chronicle of the optimism that propelled the city’s transformation and its eventual disappointment allows us to apprehend as never before the lively drama of Nanjing urban space.” —Peter J. Carroll, Wayne V. Jones Research Professor in History, Northwestern University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3628-3 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press