Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts

ELEVATION OR FAÇADE

193 Liang Sicheng (1901–1972), founder of the modern study of Chinese architecture in China, was one of China’s most influential modern architects and China’s leading architectural historian from the late 1920s and even posthumously.1 Liang’s most influential work before the year 1949 was accomplished when he was the pivotal member of the Zhongguo Yingzao Xueshe (Society for Research in Chinese Architecture).2 Beginning in the 1950s he was a leader in the redesign of Beijing and the establishment of architectural policy for the People’s Republic as well as the most renowned Chinese architect internationally. Whether as textual researcher and teacher, or in service with the Republican government or the People’s Republic, Liang’s methodology, work ethic, and interpretative writing were heavily influenced by his education. Upon his return to China, Liang faced the fundamental problem of how an education in Beaux-Arts classicism might elucidate Chinese traditional architecture: the Beaux-Arts was a tradition of monumentality defined through ponderous buildings of permanent materials, while Chinese traditional architecture was a timber-frame system in which perishable wood was the main material used in a spectrum of buildings from palaces to halls of state to vernacular architecture. From the outset it seemed that understanding China’s premodern buildings with a view toward Western classicism would unavoidably lead to controversy and misinterpretation. Indeed, James Fergusson (1808–1886) and Banister F. Fletcher (1866–1953) had already attempted to write global architectural histories that included China using criteria standard to the study of European architecture, but they had no formal training in Chinese art, culture, or languages.3 Liang Sicheng was aware of inherent contradictions between Western methodology and Chinese material that had not been perceived by Western architectural historians. The contradictions were intensified by the politics of nationalism in the China to which Liang returned from the University of Pennsylvania.4 In this chapter we explore one aspect of Chinese timber architecture that Liang Sicheng misinterpreted in his early research as a result of his adherence to Beaux-Arts and classicist training. It is apparent through three buildings, one in China and two in Europe. The Chinese example is one that this author knows intimately, for it was revealed to him in 1984 when, as a graduate student, he was given the assignment of designing a temple in the style of Southern Song (1127–1279) China. The Zhao Chen ELEVATION OR FAÇADE A Re-evaluation of Liang Sicheng’s Interpretation of Chinese Timber Architecture in the Light of Beaux-Arts Classicism 9 194 Zhao Chen first task was to make an elevation. Based on what we had learned in class at Tsinghua, I made many elevations for the main hall in order to determine the ideal proportion for the building. Once the roof, columns and connecting walls, and platform—the three fundamental parts of a Chinese timber-frame building— were added, each drawing looked amazingly different from the others. One, with a particularly high roof, drew a lot of attention from my fellow students. Its proportions were not the normal ones for a Song wooden hall, and it seemed I was trying to break from the regular form of a Song elevation. In fact, my drawing with within the proportional requirements stipulated for the Song that we had learned in class. My idea was that a hall with extra depth would allow better north-south ventilation, and this seemed particularly desirable for a building on the lower reaches of the Changjiang (Yangzi/Yangtze River) where the climate is uncomfortably hot and humid in the summer. That I have chosen to write about this incident here, indeed to raise a question about the pedagogy of China’s architectural icon, Liang Sicheng, shows how much the experience impressed me. I was fully aware of the dictums for Song architecture: the elevation of a Chinese timber structure was automatically delivered by its length and width; and the height of the roof could be determined by the section and its projection by the elevation. I also realized that it would be impossible to design a Chinese timber building based on the proportions of the façade, the system in Western architecture, especially of the Italian Renaissance, in which we had been instructed. I became suspicious of stipulations for classical Chinese architecture that I had read in our textbook, Liang’s own History of Chinese Architecture.5 We had been taught that just as Western architecture of the Italian...