Measuring Legacy: Architectural representation and cultural identity in an historical marker

This paper addresses the problem of adaptation and integration in relation to an immigrant culture by using an heritage building that possesses more than a passing historical significance to argue that sustaining an architectural work in the wake of vacillating subscription to its original use can be crucial to keeping alive contestations for community recognition. Beginning with an architect’s gaze initiated by a measured drawing exercise, it observes a range of architectural adaptations that the building has undergone in integrating itself into a transposed location, before suggesting that consideration of the historical and social narratives embedded in building-and-builder is inevitable to map their communal contribution to national conversations fully. Employing a hybrid methodology of architectural case study and interpretive, literaturebased, social analysis, it finds that engagement with the equatorial climate wrought the most change to the northern Chinese typology of this building, and that there is a metaphorical parallel in the inherent narrative that highlights cultural negotiation and compromise. It concludes by arguing that any unequivocal quest for historical truth can only be healthy for a multicultural society that keeps vigil over political harmony, and that the process necessarily involves “re-storying” as much as “archaeological” findings. It suggests five potential areas for further research.