Vernacular Architecture in Historic Chinese Cities

Acknowledgements

This site was created by Daniel Benjamin Abramson for Professor LÜ Junhua's research group in the Department of Urban Planning and Design of the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The historic cities of Quanzhou and Beijing are the subject of research and practical neighborhood redevelopment planning projects conducted by Professor LÜ, and also by Professor SUN Fengqi in the Department of Architecture. In the course of surveying these neighborhoods, Professors LÜ and SUN and their students took photos, studied housing forms and interviewed residents. Most of the photos and maps and some of the interview results included in this site were taken during these surveys. Besides Dan Abramson himself, other members of the group who have directly contributed materials or participated actively in the development of this site include Professor LÜ's lecturer, TAO Tao, and her students, LI Yinong (Masters '97), TAN Ying (PhD '98), Johan NILSSON (PhD candidate), and WANG Ying (Masters '98).

Special thanks are due to LI Yuxiang, professional photographer and author of the book series on Chinese vernacular architecture, Lao Fangzi ("Old Houses"), who generously allowed his slides of Quanzhou regional architecture to be digitized and shown on this site.

A number of academic and official experts helped to enrich the content of the site. Those whose knowledge proved particularly helpful were: Professor ZHU Zixuan at Tsinghua University; Mr. SHAN Jixiang, former Director of the Beijing Municipal Cultural Relics Bureau; Mr. DONG Guangqi, Director Emeritus of the Beijing Municipal Institute of Urban Planning; Ms. LU Xiaoxiang, former Head of the Beijing Old and Dilapidated Housing Renewal Office; Mr. XU Wei, Head of the West City District Cultural Relics Office; Mr. WANG Lianmou, Curator of the Quanzhou Maritime Museum; Professor FANG Yong at Quanzhou Overseas Chinese University. Staff of the Beijing West City District Urban Planning Bureau, and the Quanzhou Municipal Urban Planning Bureau and the Quanzhou Municipal Institute of Urban Planning Institute in particular provided friendly and consistent official support.

Finally (but not leastly) among the many people who contributed time and expertise to the site, HAO Xin provided invaluable technical help with the HTML, the digitizing of photographs, and translating of materials in Chinese.

Generous financial and logistical support came a wide range of sources. The initial gathering of materials shown here was supported from 1992 through 1996 by a Kunstadter Foundation travel grant and a Lawrence B. Anderson Award grant from the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Further gathering of materials, digitization of images, and the publishing of these pages on the Tsinghua server in 1997 was supported by the Asian Cultural Council. Continued development of these pages by Dan Abramson has been made possible by a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, by use of the computational design lab at UBC's School of Architecture, and by use of the Asian Multimedia Resource Center at UBC's Institute of Asian Research.

Return to Historic Chinese Cities homepage