Chinese Bridges: Living Architecture from China's Past

摘要

Descriptive text and documentary photography are carefully interwoven in this overview of vernacular bridges surviving in China. Here vernacular refers to traditional construction as an empirical art practiced before the advent of modern engineering. Bridges across China's spatial and temporal geography are presented as cultural artifacts, but "unlike a building ...wherein the structure is a means to an end ... the structure of any bridge is as much a means as an end" (p. 13).