| buy book | ALLEGORICAL ARCHITECTURE By Xing Ruan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2006 The Dong people are a minority group living in mountainous areas of the Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi provinces of southern China, known architecturally for their drum towers, ‘wind and rain’ bridges, and ‘ganlan’ timber houses. This book is the first deep study connecting the architecture with the rest of their culture. Until half a century ago Dong culture lacked any form of written script, so life for most people depended on oral transmission and ritual, with crucial dependence on visual and spatial cues. The core of Ruan’s thesis is a rich analysis of the Dong drum tower. Dong villages were traditionally occupied by a group sharing one surname and led by a single chief with a quasi-religious role, whose job was to make political decisions with the help of a council, deal with offenders against the law, and lead the many rituals that constitute Dong life. The village had a distinct territory and well defined gates, establishing a strong sense of centre and periphery, and its centre was marked by the drum tower, an elaborate wooden structure with multiple roofs rising above the mass of houses and dominating the village square. The drum gathered people together like a European belfry, and its structure was meant to be visible from every house in the village. It was built by a local carpenter as the pinnacle of his creative production, richly decorated and showing maximal constructive elaboration. It was therefore the key monument and main aesthetic vehicle, all villagers contributing to its building and upkeep. Symbolically, it represented both a tree and a shelter, but it also contained at its very centre and base a village hearth, from which a new light was taken to each house hearth at rituals of renewal. The drum tower was the centre of political decision-making and enactment of law, but also the focus of ritual courtship between villages and the stage for song performances which carried essential historical and moral stories. I use the past tense here because as Ruan explains, modernity and tourism have intervened, but much continuity remains, and the evidence is unusually rich. The theoretical contribution of this book lies in a clarification about how architecture operates as a medium of exchange. Ruan stresses that the meaning of the drum tower lies as much in the use of its spaces and relation to the context as in the symbolism of its form, and that it lies also in the processes and accompanying rituals of construction. He believes that in the absence of written texts, architecture retains priority as an embodiment of village beliefs and social organisation. It need not be consciously read, but remains present as a mnemonic and a prompt for belief and action, and as an agent of exchange constantly open to reinterpretation. That is why he affirms at one point, in opposition to the semiotic and literary obsessions of the last thirty years, that architecture is not a text, calling it instead an allegory. I fear that this term could become yet another trap, but recognition of the limitations of the text metaphor – that texts have their own special conventions and do not embrace practical or symbolic action as architecture does – is long overdue. He also rightly questions the presumed priority of texts as the authoritative foundation and repository of ideas, something that tends to be taken for granted by those whose living revolves around the written word. By helping to demonstrate that meaning in architecture was traditionally carried as much by the ritual resonance of its spaces as by its objects, and again no less in the circumstances of its construction, Xing Ruan has done us all a service. PETER BLUNDELL JONES |