Postcolonial-Urban-Maritime Architecture in Asia

Francis Chia Hui Lin is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. His research explores the intersections of architectural theory, postcolonial thought, and urbanism in Asia, with a particular focus on epistemic entanglement, maritime grounds, and the politics of spatial knowledge. He is the author of Heteroglossic Asia (2015), Architectural Theorisations and Phenomena in Asia (2017), and The Postcolonial Condition of Architecture in Asia (2022). His work has been recognised with the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award (2019), one of Taiwan’s highest honours for early-career scholars. He is also founding director of Studio: Asia, Postcoloniality and Spatiality (APS), an academic platform dedicated to interrogating spatial practices through critical postcolonial perspectives..

• Introduction: Asian Architectural Epistemology Today Chapter 1: Historiography Chapter 2: Urbanity Chapter 3: Postcoloniality Chapter 4: One of Asian and the Postcolonial–Urban–Maritime Turn

"Using the notion of flows, fluidity and flux as the critical lens, Professor Lin has skillfully deconstructed the often used ‘tropes’ that perpetuate a static reading as well as fetishization of popular imaginaries of Asian Architecture. In his rigorously articulated provocations, he unfolds a convincing argument for grounded theory. A position which discerns life, temporality, emergent urbanism, and their ever-shifting relationship to the making of architecture as the foundation to construct theory situated in particularities. Theory that could resist generalized readings and move towards a more pluralistic as well as dynamic understanding of architecture in different locations in Asia."Rahul Mehrotra , John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the GSD , Harvard University.