Tracy Miller – författare

The Teacher's Guides for ¡Listos! show where Framework objectives are launched and reinforced. Starters and plenaries are provided for each unit to help you teach structured lessons. Concise notes guide you though each unit in the book. Tape transcripts and answers to the activities are provided. Includes suggestions for simplifying and extending activities as well as ICT suggestions.

Built around three sacred springs, the Jin Shrines complex (Jinci), near Taiyuan in Shanxi province, contains a wealth of ancient art and architecture dating back to the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). The complex's 1,500-year-long textual record allows us to compare physical and written evidence to understand how the built environment was manipulated to communicate ideas about divinity, identity, and status. Jinci's significance varied over time according to both its patrons' needs and changes in the political and physical landscape. The impact of these changes can be read in the physical development of the site. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious, social, and art historians, this book seeks to recover the motivations behind the creation of religious art, including temple buildings, sculpture, and wall paintings. Through an examination of building style and site organization, the author illuminates the multiplicity of meanings projected by buildings within a sacred landscape and the ability of competing patronage groups to modify those meanings with text and context, thereby affecting the identity of the deities housed within them. This study of the art and architecture of Jinci is thus about divine creations and their power to create divinity.

In traditional studies of Chinese architecture, Buddhist halls are often seen as mere variations of imperial palaces and understood primarily as shelters. Harnessing Divinity challenges this view, arguing that ritual buildings in Early Medieval China were designed with active spiritual technologies that could harness natural energies and facilitate communication with higher realms.Focusing on the Yellow River Valley during the beginning of state-sponsored Buddhism in China, this book reveals how a specific design strategy—the “floral diagram” or “daisy wheel”—was used to encode buildings with intrinsic, generative power. Tracy Miller demonstrates that this geometric method allowed structures to function as “mesocosms,” bridging terrestrial and celestial forces to support both state-building by the ruling elite and spiritual transformation of devotees.Through detailed case studies of sixth-century monuments, Miller argues that creators integrated empirically verifiable design principles with ideologies from West, Central, and South Asia to construct ritually potent spaces. The mathematical precision, critical for structural integrity, allowed for the building of taller, grander structures that projected divine support for the state. By tracing the use of a particular “generative design,” this book offers a compelling new perspective on the intersection of science, religion, and material culture in pre-modern China, showing how architecture was scaled to aid both imperial and common patrons.