Product Description: An exciting explosion of urban expansion is occurring in East Asia: cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are expanding at a prodigious rate and bringing widespread change to the region. Peter G. Rowe's East Asia Modern is a timely comparative analysis of urban growth in this rapidly evolving part of the globe...read more

Product Description: The rise of Shanghai over the past decade is a story of superlatives. The city's skyline has been totally transformed. It now boasts some of world's tallest buildings and longest bridges. This volume presents portfolios of more than thirty design projects recently completed or currently underway, along with expert essays offering pointed analyses from urban design to conservation, confirming Shanghai's preeminent position in the global network...read more

Built around snatches of discussion overheard in a Beijing design studio, this book explores attitudes toward architecture in China since the opening of the Treaty Ports in the 1840s. Central to the discussion are the concepts of ti and yong, or "essence" and "form," Chinese characters that are used to define the proper arrangement of what should be considered modern and essentially Chinese. Ti and yong have gone through various transformations—for example, from "Chinese learning for essential principles and Western learning for practical application" to "socialist essence and cultural form" and an almost complete reversal to "modern essence and Chinese form." The book opens with a discussion of cultural developments in China in response to the forced opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to reform the Qing dynasty, and the Nationalist and Communist regimes. It then considers the return of overseas-educated Chinese architects and foreign influences on Chinese architecture, four architectural orientations toward tradition and modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, and the controversy over the use of "big roofs" and other sinicizing aspects of Chinese architecture in the 1950s. The book then moves to the hard economic conditions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, when architecture was almost abandoned, and the beginning of reform and opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it looks at the present socialist market economy and Chinese architecture during the still incomplete process of modernization. It closes with a prognosis for the future.

Product Description: The development of modern urban housing in China over the past 160 years is examined in this volume. From the beginnings of China's modernization after the Opium Wars to the latest trends adopted after the market reforms of the 1980s, this publication offers a broad overview of the developments in buildign construction and design...read more

Product Description: A study of the shape and appearance of civic places and the social, political, and cultural circumstances that bring them into existence.A civic place belongs to everyone and yet to nobody in particular. In Civic Realism, Peter G...read more

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Product Description: This timely and thought-provoking collection of essays offers a detailed examination of contemporary architectural practice in the 1990s. Reflections on Architectural Practices in the Nineties grew out of a year-long symposium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, which took stock of pressing issues in order to speculate on future paths for both education and practice...read more

Product Description: Starting from the question of how the design of modern housing can be successful, Peter Rowe explores the social, cultural, and expressive history of housing at two crucial moments: the first large-scale developments along modernist lines in the 1920s, and the widespread reconsideration of modernist principles in the 1970s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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In Design Thinking Peter Rowe provides a systematic account of the process of designing in architecture and urban planning.