Jianfei Zhu

Jianfei Zhu is Professor of East Asian Architecture at Newcastle University UK. He studied architecture at Tianjin and UCL. Obtaining a PhD at Bartlett School in the early 1990s, he had taught in China and Australia before joining Newcastle in 2019. Jianfei’s research has centred on relations between power, culture and architecture; he has worked on space-power relations, visualization, urban form, design thinking, and critique of the everyday, with a special reference to China. He is the author of Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing 1420-1911 (Routledge 2004), Architecture of Modern China (Routledge 2009), Forms and Politics (Tongji 2018); and the editor of Sixty Years of Chinese Architecture 1949-2009 (CABP 2009). He has published papers including “Criticality in between China and the West” (Journal of Architecture 2005) and “Empire of Signs of Empire” (Harvard Design Magazine 2014). He is editing (with H Li and W Chen) Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture (forthcoming in 2021). His new research centres on geopolitics and design knowledge through the Cold War as a transnational process.