Preface

The book is the result of an international cooperation between Universities; more precisely, this work was premiered in four lectures held in May 2016 at the Ph.D. in Architecture and Construction (Draco) in Sapienza University. The lectures were organized in the context of a General Agreement signed between the School of Architecture of Tianjin University in China and the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. The author of this book is in charge for the agreement for the Chinese Institution, while the author of the brief preface is in charge for the Italian one. After this challenging didactic experience, as an outcome of the cultural exchange that took place inside the Ph.D. the text, that is a brilliant story of Chinese architecture, has then been rewritten in an expanded form to fulfill the volume.