Lecture Series: CJ Lim

Once Upon a China Book Cover

'Once Upon a China' 

Wednesday 11th October 2023 1pm Reilly Room

This is an in person event and will not be recorded

Click here to book your place if you are an external visitor

Book Launch: Once Upon a China will be on sale at a discounted price (£15 instead of £20), cash only.

‘Once Upon a China’ is an unconventional architectural story of great beauty, empathy, honour and sadness. The chapters are ingenious re-imaginations of ‘Dream of the Red Mansion’, ‘Journey to the West ’, ‘The Water Margin’, and ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, and are conceived as specific themes of Chinese identity: domesticity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability. The eccentric comic-inspired architectural drawings in this book enrich the processes of conception and conceptualisation of design – their fragmented yet sequential nature proves versatility in the imagination of spatial experiences, enabling the complex stories of place, brief and building to materialise

Biography

CJ Lim is the Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at The Bartlett UCL and founder of Studio 8 Architects. He has held a long preoccupation with architectural storytelling, exploring how narratives from literature, history, politics and humanity can inform the innovation of resilient architecture and cities. His other authored books published by Routledge include ‘Short Stories: London in two-and-a-half dimensions’ (2011), ‘Food City’ (2014), ‘Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or urban future?’ (2017) and ‘Smartcities, Resilient Landscapes and Eco-warriors’ (2019).