An Architecture under Influence? Building between the Local and the Global and across the Colonial and the Postcolonial in Southeast Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Architectural aesthetics are rarely neutral. Patterns of influence are too often seen in simplistic ways as manifestations of domination transmitted in a uniform manner. The four papers in this panel demonstrate the multiplicity of forms and senses that influence can take, and unravel the dynamics of interpretations of styles from pre-colonial to postcolonial periods. Each paper covers a broad modern period, while incorporating themes of interpretations of bygone eras. By showing complex connections across time periods, the panel calls into question the widespread acceptance of the great divide between pre-colonial and colonial periods, and between colonial and postcolonial periods, respectively. The panelists achieve this by examining: accumulated incorporation of aesthetic influences from pre-colonial through colonial sources in a single Thai temple (Rujivacharakul); Vietnamese architects, as colonial and postcolonial subjects, partaking in International Modernism while responding to local needs and tastes (Herbelin); recurring patterns of stylistic dialogue across colonial and postcolonial periods in Ho Chi Minh City (Hahn); and renewal of “local” styles drawing from selected usage of the past in Indonesia’s Riau Islands for the state-led construction of local identity (Moser). Through cases of cultural exchange across time and space, the panel examines ideological underpinnings of aesthetics that loom large in questions of heritage and identity regarding the local and the global, and show that it is far from the case that influence has flowed simply following trajectories of domination.

Area of Study

• Southeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Hazel Hahn, Seattle University

Chair

• Hazel Hahn, Seattle University

Individual Presentations

• Temple of Dawn: Architecture, Novel, and Reincarnation - Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of Delaware

• Situating Modernity: The First Generation of Vietnamese Architects and the Search for a National Architecture - Caroline Herbelin, Université de Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès

• Rounded Edges: Architectural Dialogue in Ho Chi Minh City across Colonial and Postcolonial Periods - Hazel Hahn, Seattle University

• Constructing a Sense of “Pastness”: New Built Heritage in Indonesia’s Riau Islands - Sarah Moser, McGill University