Architectural and Cultural Guide

Edited by Natascha and Philipp Meuser

With additional contributions by Bill McKay,
Lomita Niuatui, Stefan Rusu, ­Jacqueline Windh, Lizzie Yarina et al.

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.

135 x 245 mm
400 pages
350 images
Softcover

ISBN 978-3-86922-956-0

This title is expected to become
available in September 2026.