Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At its core, this book is the result of an international conference, “The Beaux-Arts, Paul Philippe Cret, and 20th Century Architecture in China,” which took place at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design from October 3 through 5, 2003.1 The idea for the conference, meant to reflect upon Penn’s largely unsung contributions to the development of Chinese architecture, arose from conversations that Sydney-based architecture professor Xing Ruan had with Joseph Rykwert. Subsequently, Rykwert conferred with Penn professors Nancy Steinhardt and Tony Atkin and the dean at that time, Gary Hack, who provided funding from the School of Design. Steinhardt and Atkin then asked Jeffrey Cody, at the time Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to assist in organizing the conference. Financial support was received from the Albert Kunstadter Family Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, and the Asian Cultural Council, as well as Penn’s School of Design and Center for East Asian Studies. Many of the talks delivered at the conference have been revised and expanded to become chapters in this book, and a few new ones have been added. The process was longer than we hoped and could not have occurred without the good will of every essay author. We thank each of them for their many contributions at various stages. We also thank the following: the editors of the University of Hawai‘i Spatial Habitus series, Ronald Knapp and Xing Ruan, for their encouragement to turn the conference papers into this book; the ever-supportive University of Hawai‘i Press Senior Editor, Patricia Crosby; and the equally enthusiastic Publisher of Hong Kong University Press, Michael Duckworth. Finally, we truly thank Carole Tashel of Atkin Olshin Schade Architects for her never ending patience, high standards, and unflagging belief in this book. Without her, the book could not have been finished. The result of all the above is an array of scholarship that coheres around issues related to Western classicism adapted to Chinese traditions, architectural modernism taking root amid political uncertainty, and Chinese socialism integrating new languages of architecture into a cacophony of cultural change. In China, architectural challenges are compelling, in part because China’s historic architecture has suffered enormously in the recent past from so-called “modernization” (xiandaihua), in part because reconciliation between conservation and replacement is still being resolved, and in part because the impulse in China to be “new” or “avant-garde” is engaging not only so many younger Chinese architects, but also a multitude of renowned architects from around the globe.2 The infectious dynamism in China associated with architectural design, production, and implementation—as well as with urban design, planning, housing, infrastructure, and environmental degradation/conservation—is so extraordinary viii Acknowledgments that the scale and scope of the implications arising from this integration are almost unimaginable. During the 2003 Penn conference, Gary Hack raised the intriguing question of what scholars and critics would be saying about Chinese architecture if a similar conference were to be held at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Most of us will never know the answer, but we can hope that the ideas, cases, analyses, and syntheses contained in this book will assist future researchers to better understand what we have just termed the dynamism of early twenty-first century architecture in China. Notes 1. The following twenty-two scholars delivered papers at the 2003 conference; they are listed in alphabetical order with their affiliations at that time following their names. Tony Atkin (Penn), Peter Carroll (Northwestern), Yung Ho CHANG (Peking University), Jeffrey Cody (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jean-Louis Cohen (New York University and l’Institut Français d’Architecture), FU Chao-Ching (National Taiwan University), Elizabeth Grossman (Rhode Island School of Design), GU Daqing (Chinese University of Hong Kong), HUANG Yunsheng (University of Virginia), Seng KUAN (Harvard University), LI Shiqiao (National University of Singapore), Andrew I-Kang LI (Chinese University of Hong Kong), QIN Youguo (Tsinghua), Xing RUAN (University of Technology, Sydney), Joseph Rykwert (Penn), Jonathan Spence (Yale), Nancy S. Steinhardt (Penn), David Van Zanten (Northwestern), Rudolf Wagner (University of Heidelberg), Mary Woods (Cornell), ZHANG Jie (Tsinghua), and ZHAO Chen (Southeast [Nanjing] University). In addition to these papers, David Brownlee (Penn), Gary Hack (Penn), and Tunney Lee (MIT and Chinese University of Hong Kong) gave commentaries about the papers. 2. For xiandaihua, see Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means...