Balinese style villas and resorts are popping up everywhere--from Ibiza to St Barts to Singapore. But what is Balinese architecture? And why is it so popular today? Traditional Balinese houses, temples and pavilions are designed to allow man to exist in harmony with the natural forces of the universe--reflecting core Balinese beliefs about man's place in relation to the cosmos, the gods, the ancestors, and the world around him. Innovative local and Western architects have been designing resorts and villas on Bali for decades, drawing their inspiration from these local traditions. In this one-of-a-kind book, author Julian Davison provides a comprehensive guide to Balinese architectural forms, the Balinese belief system, the rituals associated with building, the materials and construction techniques, and the intricate ornamentation used. Over 100 watercolor illustrations and photographs provide a clear picture of the island's architecture as well as an eye-opening look at a culture and a people that have captivated the world's imagination.

"With a sharp eye for trends, and passionate opinions about how Balinese design principles should be applied, Wijaya enhances his survey of traditional Balinese architecture with examples of its adaptation in modern private houses and boutique hotels on the island.

Based on a lifelong professional and personal interest, "Traditional Buildings" presents a unique survey of vernacular architecture across the globe. The reader is taken on a fascinating tour of traditional building around the world, which includes the loess cave homes of central China, the stilt houses on the shores of Dahomey, the housebarns of Europe and North America, the wind towers of Iran, the Bohio houses of the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean, and much more. Professor's Noble's extensive travels have allowed him to examine many of the building at close quarters and the richly illustrated text includes photographs from his personal collection. With its comprehensive and detailed bibliography, the work will be welcomed by experts and non-specialists alike.

Allegorical Architecture offers the first detailed architectural analysis of built forms and building types of the minority groups in southern China and of the Dong nationality in particular. It argues that Dong architecture symbolically resembles its inhabitants in many ways. The built world is an extension of their body and mind; their experience of architecture is figurative and their understanding of it allegorical. Unlike the symbolism of historical architecture, which must be decoded through a speculative reconstruction of the past, the Dong tell stories about inhabitants in their living state in the recurrent process of ritualistic making and inhabiting of their built world. This book thus offers architectural analysis of both spatial dispositions (building types) and social life (the workings of buildings). Xing Ruan likens the built world to allegory to develop an alternative to textual understanding. The allegorical analogy enables him to decipher minority architecture less as a didactic "text" and more as a "shell," the inhabitation of which enables the Dong to renew and reinvent continually the myths and stories that provide them with an assurance of home and authenticity. Attention is focused less on the supposed meanings (symbolic, practical) of the architecture and more on how it is used, inhabited, and hence understood by people. Throughout, Ruan artfully avoids the temptation to textualize the built world and read from it all sorts of significance and symbolism that may or may not be shared by the inhabitants themselves. By likening architecture to allegory, he also subtlety avoids the well-worn path of accounting for rich traditions via a "salvage ethnography"; on the contrary, he argues that cultural reinvention is an ongoing process and architecture is one of the fundamental ingredients to understanding that process. Ruan offers "thick description" of Dong architecture in an attempt to understand the workings of architecture in the social world. Paying attention to Dong architecture within a regional as well as a global context makes it possible to combine detailed formal analysis of settlement patterns and building types and their spatial dispositions with their effects in a social context. Architecture, in a broad sense, is assumed to be an art form in which the feelings and lives of its makers and inhabitants are embodied. The artifice of architecture—its physical laws—is therefore analyzed and contested in terms of its instrumental capacity. Allegorical Architecture is a work of refreshing originality and compelling significance. It will provide timely lessons for those concerned with the meaning and social sustainability of the built world and will appeal to architects, planners, cultural geographers, anthropologists, historians, and students of these disciplines.

Exploring interrelationships, this collection analyzes "house" systems in Southeast Asia and South America. It is inspired by Lévi-Strauss's suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of Medieval Europe were the best-known examples of a widespread social institution.

Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of "the living letter" may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—linked to academic philology, reform Hinduism, and local politics—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. More than Words shows how Balinese practices of apotropaic writing—on palm-leaves, amulets, and bodies—challenge these notions, and yet coexist alongside them. Reflecting on this coexistence, Fox develops a theoretical approach to writing centered on the premise that such contradictory sensibilities hold wider significance than previously recognized for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.