Not Exactly the Same: On the Fantasy of “Chinese Architectural Copies”
In 1755, at the height of the European mania for chinoiserie, a British employee of the Swedish East India Company named William Chambers returned to England after three voyages to the port of Guangzhou, China. Leveraging his firsthand experience of China and a subsequent five years in Rome and Paris, Chambers would fashion himself into the leading establishment architect and landscape designer of the day, Architect to King George III, Master Surveyor, and first Treasurer of the Royal Academy of Art. In the 1760s, Chambers designed the Chinese Pagoda (Figure 12.1) and the House of Confucius for the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, for which trees and flowers from all climes and soils were sought, and the architectural styles of the ancient civilizations rebuilt in a veritable encyclopedia of the natural and built world.
in Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange
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