Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific

Built Traces of Intercolonial Trade, Industry and Labour, 1800s-1950s

Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, Soon-Tzu Speechley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781350421387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture

Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific explores the architecture of colonial trade and industry, revealing a complex network of transnational connections across the built heritage of the world's most dispersed and culturally diverse region.

A wide-ranging collection of case studies uncover these forgotten connections, drawing together stories of migratory architects, imperial commodities, and indentured labour. From Iran to Tasmania, Japan to Java, and Imperial China to the Pacific Islands, the chapters reveal how remnants of colonial trade and industry shed light on the many multi-faceted mobilities of the imperial age, and their enduring legacy in the postcolonial built environments of Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

The chapters also reveal deep strands of cultural influences and material imprints long neglected by national histories of architecture, and showcase new methodologies to analyse the interconnectivities and bordering practices which are shaping our experiences of the 21st century.

With almost every chapter arising from new archival sources, this richly interdisciplinary volume brings together the work of architectural historians, geographers and heritage practitioners to provide a new understanding of the rich and contested history of this region.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Tracing Encounters and Exchanges in Colonial Asia Pacific: Towards a New Geography of Architectural Histories
• Part I Flows and Networks
• 1 Asia Pacific Encounters: On the Trail of Colonial Shipping Networks
• 2 Infrastructuring Migration: Routes, Nodes and the Construction of Labour Mobility in Colonial Sumatra
• 3 Building Networks: Professional Mobility and the Migration of Architects in the Imperial World
• Part II Enterprises and Commodities
• 4 Biscuits and Buildings: The Colonial Enterprise of Swallow and Ariell
• 5 ‘Lonely Dots’: John Thomas Arundel and the Architecture of Greater British Enterprise in the Pacific
• 6 A Tale of Sugar Factories in Colonial Java: Transformation of Transnational Companies
• 7 Constructions on the Commercial Network of a British Colonial Firm: Branch Buildings of Jardine Matheson & Co. in Nineteenth-Century East Asia
• Part III Craftmanship, Materiality and Built Forms
• 8 Whaling in the Tasman World
• 9 Technology Spillover in Imperial Times: Cantonese Contractors and Concrete Coastal Fortifications in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, 1876–82
• 10 Imprints of the Basel Mission Industries on Indian Ocean Architectures
• 11 A ‘Spiritual Home’ Far away from Home: The Chinese Temples in Colonial Medan, Dutch East Indies
• Part IV Cosmopolitan Heritage and Historical Memory
• 12 The Absent Referent of Exchange in South and Southeast Asian Trade: The Role of Iranian Trade Networks in Facilitating Colonial Commodities in the Nineteenth Century
• 13 Analysing Nineteenth-Century Military Building Typologies: An Australian Perspective
• 14 Unlocking Maps, Locating Forms: Historical Maps as Windows onto Past Industry, Agriculture and Trade in the Asia Pacific
• References
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright