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.
Meuser, Natascha
Natascha Meuser (born 1967) is an architect and publisher. She studied architecture in Rosenheim and Chicago and completed her PhD at the Technical University of Berlin. From 2016 to 2023, she was a full professor at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, where she founded the Institute for Zoo Architecture in 2020. Her research focuses on architectural typologies that explore the relationship between humans and animals, as well as between humans and nature. A particular emphasis of her work lies in the field of educational buildings, with a strong interest in how spatial environments shape learning and perception. She is the author and editor of numerous publications, including "Aquarium Buildings. Construction and Design Manual" (with Jürgen Lange), and continues to explore the communicative potential of architecture in both academic and practical contexts.
Meuser, Philipp
Philipp Meuser (born 1969) is an architect and publisher. He studied architecture in Berlin and Zurich with a focus on architectural history and theory, and completed his PhD at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation on the typology of Soviet mass housing. His work operates at the intersection of practice and theory, combining design with cultural and historical analysis. Motivated by questions of resilience and climate change, Meuser has increasingly focused on non-European building cultures. His research spans a wide range of geographies – from the vernacular architecture of sub-Saharan Africa and the authoritarian urbanism of Eurasia to the spatial traditions of Polynesia – reflecting his commitment to a globally informed architectural discourse. In 2005, he founded DOM publishers together with Natascha Meuser. Under their direction, the publishing house has become a leading platform for international architectural publications. In recognition of his contribution to academic exchange with Eastern Europe, Meuser was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2017. He has held an honorary professorship at O.?M.?Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv, Ukraine, since 2018, and served as visiting professor for public humanities and cultural heritage at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2022.
