Western Polynesia. Architectural and Cultural Guide
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Beschreibung
This Architectural and Cultural Guide West Polynesia offers a critical perspective on the architecture of Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, Niue, and the surrounding archipelagos, where settlement history, ecological adaptation, and cultural negotiation have shaped the built environment over centuries. Across more than 400 richly illustrated pages, the volume traces how indigenous building traditions, maritime exchange networks, and later colonial interventions transformed architectural practices in this region.
With contributions from local scholars, architects, and historians, the guide highlights the entanglements of place, ritual, and resilience: from monumental earthworks and royal compounds to climate-responsive fale dwellings and the enduring symbolism of community meeting houses. Rather than reducing architecture to typologies, it foregrounds architecture as process – as a way of negotiating hierarchy, spirituality, and environmental challenge in island societies.
West Polynesia emerges here not as a periphery, but as a crucible of cultural invention, where architecture functions as a medium of memory, identity, and adaptation. This research-based publication invites critically minded travellers, architects, and scholars to reconsider the Pacific as a space where architectural intelligence is expressed less through permanence than through rhythm, collectivity, and responsiveness to land and sea.
Autor*in
Natascha Meuser
Natascha Meuser (born 1967) is an architect and publisher. She studied architecture in Rosenheim and Chicago and completed her PhD at the Technical University of Berlin. From 2016 to 2023, she was a full professor at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, where she founded the Institute for Zoo Architecture in 2020. Her research focuses on architectural typologies that explore the relationship between humans and animals, as well as between humans and nature. A particular emphasis of her work lies in the field of educational buildings, with a strong interest in how spatial environments shape learning and perception. She is the author and editor of numerous publications, including "Aquarium Buildings. Construction and Design Manual" (with Jürgen Lange), and continues to explore the communicative potential of architecture in both academic and practical contexts.
Themen in »Western Polynesia. Architectural and Cultural Guide«
Architektur Kulturgeschichte Polynesien Tonga Samoa Tuvalu Niue Ozeanien