Once Upon a China

This publication is from the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Authors

• CJ Lim | Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
• Steve McCloy | Architect and co-founder, McCloy + Muchemwa

About

Once Upon a China is an unconventional architectural story that reimagines four great Chinese literary classics — Dream of the Red Mansion, Journey to the West, The Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms — as allegories of Chinese identity, exploring domesticity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability. These pre-modern fictions, rich with diverse voices, layered philosophical perspectives and sharp satire, have long shaped the cultural and political trajectories of Chinese society and its built environment.

Comics is an unorthodox but extraordinary medium for architectural speculation. The eccentric, fragmented yet sequential qualities of comic-inspired drawings in this book enrich the processes of design conception and conceptualisation, proving versatile in the imagination of spatial experiences and enabling the complex stories of place, brief and building to materialise with unexpected clarity. At once aesthetic, narrative and political, the comic form engenders optimism for reappraising Chinese design futures and fosters critical thinking beyond the exuberance of non-contextual Western capitalist models.

The book includes four design case studies supported by the Bartlett’s Architecture Research Fund, investigating how comics as speculative and responsive satire can generate participatory dialogues about architecture’s cultural, social and environmental futures.

Once Upon a China is published by Routledge (2021). 328 pages, 247 black and white illustrations.

ISBN: 9781138224438

Further reading

• Buy the book

Image: Democracy: City under cover. Image © CJ Lim