Site and Sight: Chinese Pagoda

for more information and to reserve your spot please visit https://camlab.fas.harvard.edu/event/site-and-sight-chinese-pagoda

“Site and Sight: Chinese Pagoda” brings together an international community of professors, researchers, and graduate students to investigate discrete instantiations of the Chinese stupa-pagoda, or ta 塔, across a diversity of geographies and media. A monument that marks the absence of the Buddha Sakyamuni in our world, the pagoda became a pervasive fixture throughout China’s architectural and artistic landscapes, its ubiquity belying the site-specific programming of the architectural work in context. “Site and Sight” seeks to address this tension between the universal and the local, exploring the monument type and its siting through a series of case studies. Understanding the pagoda as a dynamic ground for the construction of meaning, conference presentations will examine questions related to place making and historic memory, multiculturalism in urban centers, and transmateriality.