Made Wijaya was an architecture student travelling in the Indonesian archipelago when he leapt overboard and swam to Bali's southern shore during a rainstorm in 1974. He became an internationally renowned landscape and architectural designer and a passionate advocate of Balinese culture. This book draws on Wijaya's photographic archives to present an unparalleled visual study of Balinese architecture: its origins, elements, variations and vagaries.

An overview of Balinese architecture in its context is followed by a look at its basic elements - the walled courtyard and the pavilion - in their full variety and their structural details. Moving through the book, Bali's intricate built landscape becomes legible and even more surprising. With a sharp eye for trends, and passionate opinions about how local design principles should be applied, Wijaya enhanced his survey of traditional Balinese architecture with examples of its adaptation in modern private houses and hotel architecture on Bali.

Besides the author's own archive photographs, the book is illustrated with the work of internationally acclaimed specialist photographers Tim Street-Porter, Luca Invernizzi Tettoni, Guido Alberti Rossi and Rio Helmi, plus drawings by Chang Huai-Yan, Deni Chung and Bruce Granquist.

This is at once a compendium for designers and an entertaining essay on the architecture of Asia's most glamorous tropical island by one of its foremost admirers.

Designers will find Architecture of Bali indispensable as a sourcebook for materials, built form, ornamentation and ideas about the use of space; lovers of Bali will want it for its documentation of a rapidly changing world; and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in ethnic architecture.