Product Description: Over a period of several years, noted Chinese cultural historian Ronald G. Knapp traveled throughout Southeast Asia, searching out homes built by the first generations of successful Chinese settlers during the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century...read more

Product Description: As many as 15,000 covered bridges were built in North America over the past 200 years. Fewer than 1,000 remain. In America's Covered Bridges, authors Terry E. Miller and Ronald G. Knapp tell the fascinating story of these bridges, how they were built, the technological breakthroughs required to construct them and above all the dedication and skill of their builders...read more

Product Description: Discover the rarified Peranakan (native-born Chinese of Southeast Asia) aesthetics that are today highly sought-after for their beauty: distinctive furniture and ceramics, textiles and jewelry, and many other art objects. Peranakan Chinese Home displays these extraordinary objects, visible markers of a highly developed culture...read more

Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, architecture, art, art history, geography, and history, House Home Family explores and analyzes the functional, social, and symbolic attributes of Chinese dwellings. It goes beyond generalization to clarify the diverse nature of house, home, and family in China, exploring such topics as the Chinese garden as an integral part of living, house-building ritual and fengshui, architectural aesthetics, the inter-relatedness of furniture and architecture, preservation of historical structures, the structure and development of the family (fla), gender and household space, the role of lineage in the construction of ritual and social space, the function and meaning of the architectural division of space, and domestic space and privacy. The Chinese house, the elementary space in which a family lives and works, resonates the tensions between continuity and innovation that characterize China today. As a dynamic instrument of socialization and a domain of propriety, its "inner" and "outer" spaces as well as ornamentation and ritual helped shape the identity of the Chinese and simultaneously serve as a reflection of this identity. This inaugural volume in the series Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia's Vernacular Architecture contains over 500 illustrations, most in color and including a number of rare drawings that demonstrate the richness of domestic architecture and living patterns in traditional and contemporary China. Through its exploration of how Chinese families are organized and why Chinese construct their living spaces the way they do, this carefully researched, convincingly argued, and refreshingly insightful book yields a deeper and wider understanding of what it means to live and be Chinese.

Product Description: City walls are considered to be the essence and signature of the traditional Chinese city. Here, Ronald Knapp explores the history and importance of walls in such cities as Chang'an and Xi'an, Beijing, Nanjing, and the recently preserved city of Pingyao. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A comprehensive critical examination of China's folk architectural forms. Together with its companion volume, "China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation", it provides a study of the environmental, historical and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Knapp, Ronald G.

Product Description: This pioneering work in Chinese domestic architecture examines for the first time the Chinese house from a cultural perspective. Knapp explores how the typical Chinese home reveals a long folk tradition of craft and symbolism, including the popular practices of fengshui...read more

Product Description: Knapp (geography, SUNY) continues the work of his previous books by examining the distinctive characteristics of the common house in Zhejing province. Over 300 original photographs illustrate his discussion of construction techniques, the organization of space, settlement patterns, the expression of folk beliefs, and the influence of formal Chinese architecture...read more

Product Description: Book by Knapp, Ronald G.

Product Description: Book by