Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION This book is the story of the convergence of two major architectural systems: Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts. Unpredictably in the early twentieth century, the two systems coalesced in the United States as approximately fifty young Chinese students received scholarships to be trained as architects in U.S. universities, many of which had adopted design teaching methodologies derived from the École in Paris.1 In the 1920s and 1930s, when the Chinese graduates of these architectural programs returned to China and began to practice architecture and to establish China’s first architectural schools, they transferred a version of what they had learned in the United States to Chinese situations. This transfer, a complex series of design-related transplantations, had major implications for China, which, between 1911—the year in which the last Chinese dynasty, Qing (1644–1911), fell—and 1949—the year the People’s Republic was founded—was simultaneously experiencing cataclysmic social, economic, and political changes. In the 1950s China experienced a radically different wave of influence branded with the imprint of the École when several architectural and engineering advisors from the Soviet Union, themselves distant products of Beaux-Arts methods via the Palace School of Architecture, Stalin, and Khrushchev, helped their Chinese comrades in the guise of socialist progress.2 The architectural and other implications of these events are still felt today. In terms of architectural theory and practice in China, these shifts of people and ideas and of assumptions about materials, structure, form, and meaning were significant. Although some authors have previously explored some aspects of the shifts, there has been no comprehensive analysis of how, why, and through whom architectural changes occurred.3 Nor have scholars fully synthesized the nature and agents of architectural change in the post-1949 period, when Chinese architectural traditions were being grafted, albeit in a different way than in the first half of the century, upon other imported ways of designing architectural form and space. By analyzing the architectural dynamics of these crucial periods, bringing together for the first time the work of major scholars from around the world, this book provides a provocative synthesis, helping readers to better understand not only what occurred historically, but also what is happening now in China as its rapidly evolving, dramatic architectural and urban changes reverberate around the globe.4 The assumption of the authors is a historical one: by delving more fully into the convoluted dimensions of historic architectural change in China, we can comprehend current trends related to architecture and construction in China with greater clarity. In this book, history begins in the waning years of the Qing dynasty when the handful of Chinese students who sought to learn the craft and profession of JeffreyW. Cody xii Introduction what is commonly called architecture—known as jianzhu in modern Mandarin— had the opportunity to study outside China.5 Prior to that, for untold generations reaching back millennia, those who wished to learn how to design and construct buildings did so as apprentices to master builders, or jiangren; they learned about trades related to construction, such as joinery, masonry, or tile-making, by what might be called on-the-job training under masters who followed ancient treatises such as the Yingzao fashi (Building standards) (1103 CE), the Lu Ban jing (Classic of [Master] Lu Ban) (1453 CE), and others.6 Nancy Steinhardt’s chapter in this book scrutinizes what the state of Chinese architecture had been and how slowly it had changed in the centuries before the appearance of a group of foreigntrained Chinese architects, called the “First Generation” (di yidai [of Chinese architects]), who began to design, build, and teach with assumptions about architecture that reached beyond the Chinese tradition. As Chinese reformers in the late-nineteenth century began to consider how to preserve Chinese essence while simultaneously understanding foreign technologies, those students rode that wave, taking advantage of opportunities to study in Europe, North America, and Japan.7 As historian Weili Ye has explained, there were actually two waves.8 The first, in the 1870s and 1880s, was associated with Qing-government-sponsored overseas educational missions (such as the Yung Wing mission between 1872 and 1881), which came to a crashing halt because of the U.S. government’s anti-Chinese exclusionary policies. During the second wave, in the 1910s, opportunities for Chinese to study in the United States became more systematic, ironically because of the tragic Boxer Rebellion (1900–1901...