Reconstructing Modernism: The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture

Author(s): Yaohua Shi

Source: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture , SPRING, 2006, Vol. 18, No. 1, Special
Issue on Modernisms' Chinas (SPRING, 2006), pp. 30-84
Published by: Foreign Language Publications

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41490954

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 Reconstructing Modernism: The
Shifting Narratives of Chinese
Modernist ArchitectureŤ

Yaohua Shi

Ť I would like to thank the Archie Since the late 1980s, Chinese literary modernism, particularly modernist
Fund at Wake Forest University for
fiction, has attracted more and more scholarly and critical attention.1
supporting my research. Thanks are
also due Eric Hayot and Kirk Denton To the extent that there is a substantial previously neglected body of
for their substantial and substantive
literature in various modernist guises from the Republican era (191 1-1949),
editorial input and my colleague David
Phillips for critiquing an earlier draft the literary focus is only natural. Although modernist practices in art and
of this article. Last but not least, a
architecture are duly acknowledged in standard histories, the treatment
special thank-you to Dr. Delin Lai of
the University of Chicago for making more often than not comes across as a recitation of dates, manifestos, and
available to me his groundbreaking
article on science and nationalism in
proclamations. The lack of detailed investigations can be attributed in part
modern Chinese architecture. to the dearth of iconographie evidence in the case of modernist art. Wars
and political upheavals caused the destruction of many, if not most, of the
1 Among the earliest studies of
modernist literature are Yan Jiayan 1989 artworks of the young Turks who experimented with post-Impressionist,
and Tan Chuliang 1996. Two important
Expressionist, Cubist, and Fauvist techniques. Only blurry photographic
studies in English are Leo Lee 1999 and
Shu-mei Shih 2001. records in magazines attest to the brief efflorescence of modernist art
associated with the Shanghai-based Breakers Society (Juelan she) and a
2 In 2001 from Hangzhou came the
couple of other small coteries of likeminded artists.2
startling announcement that a large
cache of modernist art had come Although examples of modernist architecture from the 1930s and
to light. Despite much excitement
1940s and beyond remain in cities such as Shanghai, they barely register
generated by extensive coverage in
the local media, art historians and in architectural guides and histories. To most in the general public, even

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to specialists, historical architecture conjures up images of ancient or relatives of the artists dismissed the

"rediscovered" works as forgeries. Old

revivalist structures with mock Gothic, Baroque, or neoclassic details, or
photographs of paintings by members of
upturned, characteristically Chinese roofs. Small in number and often the Juelan she are reproduced in Li Chao
1995: 129-131. For color plates of extant
barely distinguishable from the squat, strictly functionalist buildings of
modernist paintings, see Liu Xin 1996:
the 1970s and early 1980s, except perhaps by quality of construction, the 141-150.

scant collection of residences, banks, and hospitals in the modernist idiom

dating from the first half of the twentieth century hardly constitutes a
tradition.

The apparent absence of a vigorous homegrown modernist movement

is said to stem from several factors, not least of which is a misrecognition
of historical trends. Instead of sitting at the feet of visionary European
modernist masters, the vast majority of the first generation of formally
schooled Chinese architects trained in the conservative neoclassical tradition

in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the United States, most notably at that
Beaux Arts bastion, the University of Pennsylvania. In contrast, Japanese
architects, according to historian Wu Jiang, hitched their wagons to the
right horses and traveled down the European modernist path (Wu 2002).
Thus, China lags behind not only the West but also Japan, China's perennial
rival in the modern age. Whereas China misjudged history and failed
repeatedly to modernize, Japan managed time and again, either through
acumen or sheer luck, to move with the times.
The rise of nationalism is posited as another cause for the stunted
development of modernism in China. With the ascendancy of the Nationalist
3 In 1930f the Nationalist Party published
Party in the 1 920s, public projects were frequently built in Chinese revivalist
the Manifesto of the Nationalist Art

styles. In concert with the official ideology of restoring Confucian moral Movement (Minzuzhuyi wenyi yundong
xuanyan). Two years later, encouraged
values, Chinese imperial architecture was regarded the appropriate national
by the Central Propaganda Department
style for government buildings, museums, stadia, etc.3 Interestingly, the of the Nationalist Party, ten university
professors in Shanghai signed the
architects' Beaux Arts training in the West lent itself easily to the task ofManifesto of China-oriented Cultural

adapting classical Chinese architecture to modern building programs. InConstruction (Zhongguo benwei wenhua
jianshe xuanyan). On the impact of rising
fact, Chinese classicism and Beaux Arts had much in common: both favored
nationalism on architecture, see Lai Delin
formality, symmetry, and monumentality. Architects frequently combined 1995: 52-54.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 31

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4 In his design of the Sun Yat-sen elements from both traditions.4 It is no coincidence that when the Beaux
Mausoleum (1925-1927), Lii Yanzhi
Arts curriculum was reinforced under the Soviet influence in the 1950s, it
arranges the traditional elements of an
imperial tomb - gateway, spirit path, met with little resistance. The official imposition merely reaffirmed what
memorial gate, stele pavilion - along
a central axis. The memorial hall
was already in place in most architectural departments across the nation's
is a masterly blend of Chinese and university campuses.5 Even so, Chinese nationalism demanded that the
Western classicism. The classic blue-
appearance of national authenticity be preserved; hence the emphasis on
tiled Chinese hip-and-gable roof sits on
top of a Beaux Arts-inspired tripartite formal configurations and surface details masking modern construction
reinforced concrete structure. The
techniques and materials.6 Efforts to present a clearly legible national
overall horizontal arrangement is
likewise tripartite. Further references facade became imperative in the wake of encroaching Western influence.
to Western architecture, according to
Coolly rational and resolutely devoid of overt historical or national
Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, include
the sunken crypt in the mausoleum, references, modernist architecture seemed inimical to the expression of
possibly inspired by Napoleon's Tomb
in the Invalides in Paris and Paul Creťs
"national essence" (guocui) or "national style" ( minzu fengge). (It was not
Pan American Union in Washington D.C. for nothing that modernist architecture was christened the International
See Yang Bingde 2003: 304^310; and
Style in the United States.7) Official indifference, even hostility, under both
Rowe/Kuan 2002: 69. Another example
of the mix of Beaux Arts and Chinese the Nationalist and Communist governments thus made for an inhospitable
architecture is Yang Tingbao's band shell
environment for the development of modernist architecture.
(completed in 1932) at the Sun Yat-sen
Mausoleum. The overall composition, Finally, China's lack of a robust modernist tradition is explained
the amphitheater, and the band shell
on socioeconomic grounds. A backward agrarian society, China was
itself clearly derive from Western
origins, but they are naturalized by a neither intellectually nor technologically prepared to embrace modernist
Chinese decorative scheme.
architecture originating from industrialized Europe, hence only in a few
5 In 1954, the Ministry of Education held big, Westernized cities did modernist architecture make any inroads.8
a meeting in Tianjin on standardizing
Even there, modernism was only one style among many that architects
college curricula and decreed that the
Soviet model be adopted (Qian 2004: offered to the potential client. Committed modernists were few and
18). As Miao Pu (2004: 40) points out,
with their reverence for tradition,
far between, and patrons of modernist architecture were likewise
Chinese intellectuals readily took to scarce (Xu Weiguo 1999: 12). When the Hungarian architect Ladislaus
(Western) academicism.
Hudec designed a "rationalist" house (1935-1937) for the industrialist
6 Even as the brief of the government- Wu Tongwen, he had to accommodate the owner's wish to include an
sponsored competition for the Sun
elaborate "ancestor hall" complete with a traditional Chinese coffered
Yat-sen Mausoleum stipulated that it be
built in the "classical Chinese manner," ceiling inside the sleek modernist shell (fig. 1). Tellingly, architectural
brick-and-timber construction was ruled
journals such as Chinese Architecture (Zhongguo jianzhu), published by the
out. Although the mausoleum would
be built in Chinese style, to ensure the Chinese Society of Architects, did not discriminate between modern-style

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 durability of the building for future
generations, only modern construction
techniques and materials would be
used. The emphasis on form resulted in
some highly dysfunctional buildings. For
instance, the octagonal plan of the Sun
Yat-sen Auditorium in Guangzhou, also
by Lü Yanzhi, leads to poor sightlines,
terrible acoustics, and cramped public
areas. The height of the auditorium
is twenty-three meters; the tip of the
pagoda-shaped roof, however, reaches
fifty-seven meters. Much of the design
with its irrational use of space is driven
by formal considerations (Yang Bingde
2003:311).

7 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip

Johnson, organizers of the 1932
exhibition at New York's Museum of
Modern Art, entitled the show "Modern
Architecture: International Exhibition."

To accompany the exhibition, Hitchcock

and Johnson published a book called The
International Style. Gropius, of course,
famously denied that Bauhaus was a
style. The Nazis also saw modernist
architecture as cosmopolitan, anti-
German, Jewish. See Richard Weston
1996: 168, 139.

8 Lai Delin (1995) points out that in

Republican China brick and timber were
the primary building materials instead of
cement and steel. For comparative per
capita cement and steel consumption
between China and industrialized West

in the late twenties and early thirties, see

Lai 1995: 73.

Figure 1: Ladislaus Hudec, Wu Tongwen Residence and ground plan (from Johnston/Erh
1993: 88).

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 33

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 and revivalist architecture. In its March 1934 issue, the journal featured
works of two prominent firms, Zhuang Jun (Tsin Chuan) and the Allied
Architects. The former was represented by its (Western) neoclassical Bank
of Communications in Qingdao, the latter by two Art Deco theaters, the
Metropol (Da Shanghai daxiyuan) and the Lyric (Jincheng daxiyuan) in
Shanghai. The journal lavished praise on both firms' works, treating them
9 Descriptions of the firms' works as equally valid stylistic exercises.9 Whatever the factors were that led to
include a doggerel: "Architecture old
style or new^o functionality and
the anemic progress of modernist architecture, the Japanese invasion
solidity with a view;/ 'so much the (1937-1945) and the subsequent civil war (1945-1949) put a decisive stop
better/ says the client if economy is also
in view" (in Yang Bingde 2003: 217).
to an evolving historical process. The fate of modernism was thus tied
to the checkered fortunes of China's drive to modernization. Lamenting
modernism interrupted is lamenting modernity interrupted.
In the last few years, however, a different picture of Chinese
architectural modernism has emerged. To those who insist that the Chinese
modernist legacy is flimsy at best, revisionist historians reply that it must
be examined in its proper context. Eurocentric standards and chronology
by which Chinese modernism is usually judged obscure the significance
of a native development with its own distinct trajectory. Rather than an
enervated offshoot of Western modernism, Chinese modernism should be
viewed as an important part of twentieth-century Chinese cultural history,
one that responded to local conditions and took on local characteristics.
Instead of faulting Chinese modernism for failing to reach the heights of its
European exemplar, such critics argue, we should view Chinese modernism
on its own terms (Xu Weiguo 1999: 4).
Despite recent efforts to rethink literary, artistic, and architectural
modernism, important questions remain. For instance, what factors
contributed to the different chronologies of Chinese modernism in the
fields of literature, art, and architecture? Architects and architectural
historians associated with Tongji University in Shanghai have laid claim
to an unbroken modernist tradition. Literary and artistic modernism is
generally thought to have ended with the outbreak of the War of Resistance

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Against Japan in 1937 as writers and artists of various political and aesthetic
persuasions were forced to regroup and rally around the nationalist cause.
However, instituting a Bauhaus-based curriculum at Shanghai's St. John's
University did not begin until 1942. Public and private projects continued
to be built in modernist style after 1937. Even in the 1950s, long after the
dissipation of modernist literature and art, architects designed modernist
hospitals, schools, and government guesthouses.10 10 The question of the relationship
among Chinese modernist literature,
Furthermore, the shifting narratives of modernist architecture have yet
art, and architecture and their uneven
to be critically evaluated. In what follows, I limit myself toa preliminary study chronologies, which lies beyond
the scope of this essay, is almost
of the revisionist discourses surrounding Chinese modernist architecture. I
inevitable given that practitioners
first discuss the extent to which the recent interest in modernist architecture of modernism were often active in
more than one than field. The father
is tied to the renewed desire for modernity in the post-Mao period, when
of Chinese symbolist poetry, Li Jinfa
modernist architecture is seen as not only technologically advanced but also (1900-1976), for example, trained
as a sculptor at the École des Beaux
sociopolitically progressive. In short, modernist architecture has become
Arts in Paris. After earning notoriety
a signifier of Hegelian history. To reconstruct modernism is to repair as the author of three collections of

"bizarre," "incomprehensible" poems,

historical fissures. Revisionist history emphasizes continuity over disruption.
Li won several high-profile sculptural
Reclaiming the country's "forward-looking" modernist past is par for the commissions and taught at various art
schools (before turning to diplomacy
course as reformers seek to right China from the sidetracks of ideology
and finally ending up as an operator
and resume the journey to modernization. Asserting that like modernity of a chicken farm in New Jersey in the
1950s). Li Jinfa the poet was inspired
itself, modernist architecture represents an epochal current (shidai chaoliu)
by Baudelaire and Verlaine; Li the
implies Hegelian rationality and mastery of history. sculptor professed admiration for
sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance art,
Moreover, assertions of a distinct indigenous modernist tradition
particularly that of Michelangelo, and
revolve around a local/national dichotomy that pits Shanghai against the was thoroughly entrenched in the Beaux
Arts tradition. Li dabbled in painting as
rest of the country. Thus, regional differences are cited as a cause for the
well: a black-and-white photograph of
uneven development of Chinese modernism as a whole as well as a reason his Venice after the Rain indicates that

he was influenced by Impressionism.

for the existence of a strong, continuous local or localized modernist
Yet seldom have Li's literary and artistic
tradition in Shanghai. I, therefore, examine the emergent geography of works or those of any of the other
modernists been examined together. For
Chinese architectural modernism. The radically different canonization
photographs and a brief but informative
standards mean that global and local contexts are inscribed in each other discussion of Li's poetry and sculpture,
see Yao Daimei 2001: 154-156.
in ways that set modernist architecture apart from modernist literature and
art. I argue that appropriating the built work of long-term foreign residents

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 35

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 in Shanghai puts them on the same footing as their Chinese counterparts,
contemporizing China and the West in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Chinese
modernism may have derived from, and therefore, lagged behind Europe.
In the local context of Shanghai, however, the Chinese were coeval with
the expatriates, if not actually ahead of them, in accepting modernist
architecture.

Finally, I examine the role of identity politics in recent narratives of

modernist architecture, and I look at how personal, local, and institutional
history writing motivates the efforts to retrace Chinese architectural
modernism. The heavily Shanghai-centered geography of modernism
in the 1930s and 1940s and the emphasis on Tongji University's part in
upholding the modernist tradition in the decades after the founding of
the PRC magnify the modernist legacy in the local context. The accounts
of Shanghai and Tongji's contributions, however, should not be seen as
pure evidence of local and institutional boosterism; they also provide
an escape route for contemporary Chinese architects. Reconstructing an
unbroken local modernist tradition at the turn of the twenty-first century
potentially allows the Chinese to bypass the West and overcome the sense
of belatedness as the ruptures between past, present, and future are
sutured. I conclude the essay with a brief discussion of how a present-day
architectural firm in Shanghai, Atelier Deshaus, draws on the indigenous
modernist legacy and negotiates the local/global binary.

Modernism, Modernity, and Hegelian History

Neither the optimistic narrative of Chinese modernism nor its pessimistic
counterpart questions the basic value of modernism. One of the key catch
phrases in the 1980s and 1990s in China was "joining tracks with the world"
(he shijie jiegui ); it and its variant, "marching toward the world" (zou
xiang shijie), encapsulated the desire to break out of China (antiquated
and particular) and become part of a larger historical trend (advanced
and universal). Emanating from Europe, modernism is, and was in the

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first two decades of the twentieth century, equated by its proponents
with modernity itself. Known as neoromanticism (following the German
usage) to Chinese writers and critics in the 1910s and 1920s, modernism
represented the latest development in the arts, "hence the most advanced
and the most modern" (Shih 2001: 56). Shu-mei Shih argues that the
embrace of modernism has to be understood in both the local and the

global context. In the local context, modernism connoted antitraditionalism

and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, by postulating China as the past of
the West, Chinese modernists, and their heirs, were able to step out of the
boundary of the nation-state and construct a transnational identity. In the
global context, subjecting the Chinese past to a Hegelian critique resulted
in a dichotomous conception of tradition as Chinese and particular and
modernity as Western and universal (Shih 2001: 50). China became the
peripheral recipient of all that was good and true radiating from the West.
China's distance - cultural, temporal, and geographical - from Europe and
the United States doomed it to a perpetual state of retardation.
Underlying this conception of Chinese modernism, of course, is
Hegelian linear, teleological history, which places the West, particularly
Europe, at the forefront of progress. Possessing incomplete or no objective
and subjective rationality, the non-Western world lies beyond self-conscious
history. Mediated through Marx, Weber, and others, this Enlightenment
mode of history was embraced wholeheartedly by the mainstream
intelligentsia in China (Duara 1995: 17-50). The traumatic encounters with
the West in the late nineteenth century convinced the Chinese of the need
to jettison Confucianism, which is in itself as Sinocentric and totalizing as
Enlightenment is Eurocentric and universalistic. This drastic intellectual
realignment has been characterized in terms of a profound perceptual shift.
In view of China's military and diplomatic debacles since the 1840s, China's
position as the Middle Kingdom at the center of the civilized universe
was no longer tenable. Thus, from the world (tianxia) China became a
nation (guojia). Shaken to its core, China could no longer continue to

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 37

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 claim universal validity for its civilization. Instead, China was to emerge as
a modern nation drawing on Western learning (Levenson 1958: 99-103).
Indeed, the doctrine of combining Chinese essence (ti) with Western know-
how (yong) became an idée fixe for the country's elite, never mind that
often the essence was only skin deep. Republican public architecture and
the 1950s Big Roof craze are manifestations of this lingering desire to give
11 Besides official desire for an overt modernity a Chinese face.11
national style, Peter G. Rowe and Seng
It is no accident, then, that the rediscovery of modernist architecture
Kuan (2002: 208) posit a technical
hypothesis for the emphasis on form: took place during the post-Reform period when modernization once again
Chinese architects were "generally
became of paramount importance. As Deng Xiaoping succinctly puts it,
familiar with shape and appearance
of traditional buildings but not with "development is the hard truth" (fazhan shiying daoli ). Historians such as
their essential spatial characteristics."
Wu Jiang and Xu Weiguo lament that China failed to keep with up Western
Chinese architects may also have found
it difficult to adapt traditional spatial architectural changes in the twentieth century. Wu writes that whether as
arrangements to modern programs.
a form of engineering or art, architecture must keep pace with the times
This theory is unable to explain a work
such as the faculty club (1956) at Tongji and reflect the Zeitgeist (shidai jingshen). Acutely aware of the modern
University. The architect, Li Dehua,
mechanized condition or modernity, European architects revolutionized
draws on vernacular courtyard houses
without explicitly quoting from them. architecture in response to "new social needs, new technologies, new
The original program, which called for "a
social room, a billiard room, a ballroom, a
aesthetics, and new values." Modernist architecture replaced Beaux Arts
reading room, and a bar-cafeteria," was revivalism as "the leading player of the epoch {shidai zhujue)" (Wu 2002).
essentially modern. Western-derived. See
Likewise, Xu Weiguo (1999: 12) lauds the "scientific, advanced progressive
Luo Xiaowei 1996: 242. The description
is based on that of the architect, a major nature" ( kexuexing , xianjinxing) of modernist architecture.12 It is all the
contributor to the bilingual guide.
more regrettable to Wu that during the Cold War atmosphere of the
12 On science as a core value in modern 1950s and 1960s, revivalism became associated with Soviet or socialist
Chinese architecture and its complicated
architecture and modernism equated with Western "bourgeois ideology."
relationship with the other obsession
of the twentieth century, nationalism or In part because of their Beaux Arts training, Chinese architects offered little
national character, see Lai 1995.
resistance to Soviet-style formalist architecture. Revivalist architecture with
Chinese characteristics, otherwise known as the Big Roof style, became de
rigueur for almost fifty years. When China reopened its doors in the 1980s,
history once again "played a joke" on Chinese architects whose belated
(re)acquaintance with modernism was complicated by the simultaneous
introduction of its "conservative backlash" - postmodernism. In the eyes of

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the uninitiated, the latter seemed the "more radical, more avant-garde" of
the two (Wu 2002). Taking stock of China's own modernist legacy, therefore,
assumes added urgency, if one is to clarify the confusion and point a path
to the mainstream of History.

Remapping the Geography of Chinese Architectural

Modernism

Both Wu and Xu have played a major part in rewriting the history of

Chinese modernist architecture. The landscape of modernism that emerges
from their work as well as that of other historians associated with Tongji
University is heavily centered on Shanghai and on Japanese-influenced
industrialized Manchuria. The contrast between a few modern, "advanced"
(defined in techno-economic terms) coastal cities, particularly Shanghai,
and the traditional, conservative, backward interior is striking. Examples of
modernist architecture are overwhelmingly concentrated in Shanghai and
the Northeast. At the end of his richly detailed survey, Xu (1999) concludes
that the influence of modernism during the Republican period was limited
in terms of both geographic scope and professional acceptance.
Interestingly enough, faced with the evidence presented by Xu
himself, the reader may well reach a very different conclusion. As Xu and
others show, by the mid-1 930s, almost every major architectural firm and
prominent architect had experimented with modernist styles; some had
rejected revivalism completely and become converts to modernism. The
mass media (the influential Shanghai newspaper Shenbao, for instance) as
well as specialized journals (e.g., Zhongguo jianzhu [Chinese architecture]
and Jianzhu yuekan [Architecture monthly]) ran articles on modernist
architecture.13 Even at Central University and Northeast University, supposed
13 A translation of Le Corbusier's Vers une
architecture appeared in Shishi xinbao
strongholds of Beaux Arts academicism, students were adopting modernist
(April 12, 19, 26, 1933). See Lai 1995:
styles in classroom assignments. More significantly, the most important 68-69 for a detailed list of articles on
modernist architecture and a fascinating
clients and patrons in Republican China, namely industrialist and real estate
reader's opposition to the advocacy of
developers in capitalist Shanghai, saw the advantages of modernism andthe International Style.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 39

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 took to it with few reservations, as Xu (1999) acknowledges.
The contrast between Shanghai and the Northeast (industrialized,
technologically advanced) and the rest of China (rural, backward) as an
explanatory rubric for the limited spread of modernism seems simplistic
as well. It bears recalling that most examples of historicist architecture,
whether of Western (in Shanghai, for instance) or Chinese varieties (mainly
14 Liang Sicheng and his wife, Lin in Nanjing), were also concentrated in prosperous coastal cities. For instance,
Huiyin, two of China's most prominent
Beijing, a relative backwater following the fall of the Qing dynasty, saw little
architectural historians, collaborated on
several modernist structures, including new construction of any kind, a fact that would have made the modernist
a women's dormitory and a geological
designs by Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) and Lin Huiyin (1904-1955) in that
museum for Beijing University (both
completed in 1935). Liang and Lin also city, its ancient walls still intact, all the more remarkable.14 In Kunming,
designed a storefront for the Renli
another "backward" inland city, a series of modernist structures were
Carpet Company in Beijing (1933).
The incorporation of "pilasters" of built shortly before and after the start of the war with Japan. Modernist
abstracted traditional bracket systems
architecture also appeared in Nanjing, Qingdao, and Wuhan (Xu 1999: 6,
(i dougong ) would have made the Renli
Carpet Store China's first "postmodern" 7). Although the rest of China was little affected by modernist architecture,
design. Lin Huiyin was also a successful
writer of stream-of-consciousness short
it was most likely not because of some inherent resistance to modernism,
stories and a noted modernist poet. For but simply because of lack of resources.
Lin's literary activities, see Shih 2001:
151-230.
The widely accepted geography of architectural modernism
reduplicates the China vs. the West, periphery vs. the center, backward vs.
15 This diffusion theory fails to account
for the uneven development of
advanced binaries deeply lodged in the Chinese consciousness. Radiating
modernism in the West. Britain, one far from Europe, the modernist wave barely caused a stir by the time it
of the most "advanced" industrialized

nations, for instance, is generally

rippled through to China.15 Likewise, modernism allegedly spread from
considered to have had a weak a few relatively Westernized cities to the interior. Thus the absence of a
modernist architectural tradition,
unlike Germany and France and
vigorous modernist movement in China in general and in its interior in
other European countries. Perhaps particular becomes a marker of their relative backwardness compared to
unsurprisingly, one of the most active
promoters of Art Deco and modernist
the West and Shanghai, respectively. The hierarchy between China and the
architecture in Shanghai was the French West, Shanghai and the interior explains in part the ambiguity one often
firm of Leonard, Veysseyre, and Kruze;
finds in narratives of modernism. Depending on the point of comparison,
luxury apartment buildings such as the
Gascogne and the Dauphiné were Art China either has a negligible (vis-à-vis the West) or an important modernist
Deco, and the École municipale française
Rémi was a pure modernist work. All
legacy (centered in Shanghai and a few other cities). Xu's survey begins by
three buildings are still standing. asserting that viewed in its proper context, China's modernist tradition is

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not only clearly discernible, but significant and with outstanding examples,
and then illustrates this contention; yet he concludes reluctantly, and
somewhat paradoxically, that the influence of modernism in China was
"partial," limited to a few geographical areas and architects.
It comes as no surprise, then, that narratives that draw attention to
China's indigenous architectural modernism are often intimately tied to
local and institutional history. Although China lacks a strong tradition of
modernism, pockets of the country - Shanghai, Manchuria - can claim
to have embraced modernism when the rest of the country was largely
unsympathetic. These narratives present China's modernist architecture
largely as a Shanghai, and to lesser extent, Manchurian, phenomenon. In
a predominantly agrarian society, only Shanghai, China's largest industrial
and commercial center, provided the necessary environment for the birth
of a Chinese modernist tradition. Shanghai's pragmatic, profit-seeking,
capitalist character is considered uniquely conducive to modernism
with its emphasis on function and economy. Shanghai's progressiveness
is contrasted with the rearguard stance of Nanjing and Beijing - the
Nationalist and Communist capitals, respectively - and the interior. It was
the official resistance to the International Style that hampered the full-
fledged development of modernism in China. The dichotomy between
China and the West is thus reconfigured as one between the Westernized
coastal areas and the tradition-bound hinterland. Although Shanghai
marched ahead with the West, China stood in the way of History.
This dichotomous reading of modernism downplays the conservative,
Chinese side of Shanghai and emphasizes its international and
transnational dimension instead. Shanghai's "semicolonial" history is
particularly amenable to this type of elision of national identity. The city
was shaped by a complex interplay of foreign and native power. It was
a metropolis born of clashes as well as interchanges between China and
the West, a place where the foreign- and native-born (very few actually
born in Shanghai itself) lived in close proximity. From its origin as a treaty

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 41

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 port in the 1840s through the 1930s, the city was home both to vast
numbers of Chinese migrants deracinated from neighboring provinces
and beyond because of political unrest and economic deprivations and to
stateless White Russians and Central European Jews fleeing the Bolshevik
Revolution and Nazi persecution, not to mention Sikh and Annamese
policemen, dreamers, and riffraff from all over the world, all seeking
fortune in the "adventurers' paradise." The city's capitalism and bourgeois
16 See, for instance. Bergère 1989; 2002. culture resulted from a symbiosis between Westerners and Chinese.16
Foreign and native capital and design expertise alike gave rise to the
urban landscape of modern Shanghai. The city's most distinct building
type, called shikumen, which draws elements from traditional Chinese
courtyard and European row houses, is the most visible embodiment of
17 First built by Western developers this confluence.17 The city's heterogeneity is inscribed in its "vernacular"
for the city's swelling Chinese refugee
population, shikumen soon came to
architecture, which mixes auspicious Chinese couplets with Baroque
be the dwellings of the majority of pediments and broken scrolls and combines Western facades and Chinese
Shanghai's petite bourgeoisie (Luo
Xiaowei/Wu Jiang 1997: 3, 8-12).
interior layouts.18 That is one reason architectural canonization standards
in Shanghai are significantly different from those of art and literature.
18 In this sense, shikumen are the
opposite of Republican nationalist
Unlike literature, where language plays a defining role, architecture
architecture - the Sun Yat-sen lends itself to appropriation. Literature produced by Shanghai's émigré
Mausoleum, for example - which masks
modern Western spatial configurations
communities, Yiddish theater, White Russian fiction and poetry, for
with elaborate traditional decorative instance, remains outside the Chinese literary canon, as does art by
details.
expatriate painters. The boundaries of national literature and art seem
stable when compared to those for architecture. The works of expatriate
architects such as Ladislaus Hudec and Shanghai-based foreign firms are
viewed as a legitimate part of China's (and even more so, Shanghai's)
legacy, and are routinely incorporated in architectural histories and
guides. Site instead of language appears to be the determining factor in
the canonization process. Chinese architecture is defined as architecture
situated in China.

Given the association of canonized works outside Shanghai with

colonial or semicolonia! economic and political power, the equation of

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architecture in China with Chinese architecture is no more unexpected than 19 The so-called "eight ministry buildings"
(ba da bu) were all designated "cultural
in Changchun, the capital of the Japanese puppet state Manchuko.19 The
relics" under provincial protection. All
architectural historian Yang Bingde cites the Dalian Train Station as one were built in the Japanese imperial
style popular during the height of
of two authentic modernist structures in China (the other is Xi Fuquan's
Japan's militarism. In a different
Hongqiao Sanatorium in Shanghai) without mentioning the station's context, Joseph Levenson comments
on the "museumifying" of symbols
original function as the headquarters of the Japanese-controlled South
of past "feudal" oppression in China.
Manchurian Railway (Japanese mantetsu). Although the semiofficial joint- He analyzes the implications of the
strategic divesting of the old monuments
stock venture, a virtual agent of Japan's colonialist policy in Manchuria,
of their original purposes, turning
had its head office in Tokyo, Dalian was the beginning of an extremely palaces and temples into special
places of preservation for aesthetic
lucrative rail line for the company and de facto capital of SMR's economic
contemplation. Unlike the Confucian
empire.20 Built in 1937 according to a design by a house architect (an temple turned into a recreation center
"with cages for monkeys, pythons,
engineer at the SMR) after the Japanese Kwantung Army had succeeded in
leopards" that Levenson (1958: 3:
transforming the company into "an instrument of its bidding" (Myers 1989: 113 - 115) finds so revealing, the symbols
of erstwhile Japanese domination in
1 32), the Dalian Train Station was a potent symbol of Japanese domination
the old Xinjing (Japanese shinkyo,
and a showcase for Japanese technological prowess and organizational new capital) were taken over to
serve as headquarters for the new
superiority. Yang's description and analysis of the train station focus on
provincial Communist authorities and
the rationality and intelligence of the design, calling it "an embodiment of educational facilities. Chinese national

sovereignty was reasserted through

modernist architectural aesthetic principles" without alluding to the role
direct superimposition of power and
of these principles in Japan's empire building in Manchuria (Yang Bingde denationalization, demoting the capital
of the Japanese client state to capital
2003: 203) (fig. 2).
of a Chinese province. In contrast,
If language served as an insulating wall for Chinese modernist writers the old neoclassical Japanese colonial
government building in Seoul was so
in the 1930s, relieving them of "anxieties and fears of the colonization of hated that it was detonated in 1996.

consciousness,"21 for architectural historians it is the elapse of time and For the Japanese building activities in
Xinjing, see Buck 2000: 65-89.
infusion of new functions that seem to decolonize imperialist/colonial
architecture, a process tacitly suggesting that style is superficial after all. 20 The SMR owned and managed
"tunnels, bridges, schools, parks,
The automatic inclusion of works by expatriate architects also disrupts the
administration buildings, public offices,
local/global dichotomy. Denationalization creates a community of equals hospitals, libraries, storage areas, mines,
and factories"; see Myers 1989: 109-110.
between foreign and Chinese architects. Bound by a common geography,
Apart from being a hugely profitable
long-term foreign residents, the Hungarians Hudec and Gonda and Britons company, the SMR functioned as an
agent of the Japanese state carrying out
at Palmer & Turner, Messrs. Davies & Thomas Civil Engineers and Architects,
colonial objectives (Myers 1989: 118-119,
like their young Chinese counterparts adopted the latest styles from Europe 125-132).

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 43

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21 See Shih 2001: 346. Leo Lee (1999:
312) makes a similar point.

22 Palmer & Turner was the biggest

and most venerable architectural

firm in Shanghai; it was responsible

for designing as many as ten of the
imposing buildings on the Bund, all
in revivalist styles except the Sassoon
House (1929), which was Art Deco.
Davies & Thomas (also known as
Davies & Brooke) and Gonda also
contributed to Shanghai's stock of Art
Deco: Medhurst Apartment (Davies &
Thomas), the Bank of Communication
on the Bund, and the Capitol, an office
building with a cinema on the ground
floor (the last two by Gonda).

Figure 2: Dalian Train Station. Ground plan is from Yang Bingde 2003: 203. Picture is from
http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=317162850&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=^:ií)Ac
$ 5£&in=46 [last accessed June 24, 2006]

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and United States, particularly Art Deco.22 All were far removed from the
metropolitan West. It is a rare instance of parity among the colonials.
The parallel careers of Ladislaus Hudec (1893-1 958) and Fan Wenzhao
(1893-1979) are a case in point.
The prolific Slovak-Hungarian architect Ladislaus Hudec23 left an 23 The variant spellings of the architect's
first name - Ladislav (Slovak), Lazio
enduring mark on Shanghai's landscape; many of his buildings are listed as (Hungarian), Ladislaus (German) - reflect
historical landmarks under municipal protection. A graduate of the Royal the multiethnic background of Hudec's
native Austro-Hungarian Empire.
University of Budapest and member of the Royal Institute of Hungarian
Architects, Hudec spent almost his entire career in Shanghai working for
Western and Chinese clients. Captured by the Russians soon after he joined
the Austro-Hungarian army and exiled to Siberia in 1916, Hudec managed
to escape to Shanghai two years later and joined the firm of American
architect R. A. Curry, until branching out on his own in 1925.24 Uprooted 24 Tess Johnston (1993: 86) bases her
biographical sketch of Hudec on his
from his native land, Hudec found a home in Shanghai.
widow's account. The University of
During his remarkable career spanning nearly three decades, Hudec British Columbia Library houses a special
Hudec collection consisting of more than
designed numerous churches, banks, schools, apartment buildings, and
500 architectural renderings and other
private residences, including many of Shanghai's most iconic structures. A materials. According to the library's
website, Hudec jumped off a train full of
stylistic chameleon, Hudec practiced in a large variety of idioms ranging
prisoners of war bound for the Russian
from Georgian and collegiate Gothic to Art Deco. His early works were interior at Khabarovsk near the Chinese

border and made his way to Shanghai

revivalist: the American Club (1924, Georgian), McGregor Hall at the soon afterwards.

McTyeire School for Girls and the Moore Memorial Church (1930; both
collegiate Gothic).25 The Grand Theatre, completed in 1933, is often 25 Luo Xiaowei (1996: 174) gives 1935 as
the year of McGregor Hall's completion,
described as a turning point in Hudec's career toward an infatuation with
a decade after Hudec opened his office.
American Art Deco. The storied movie palace, one of the most luxurious However, according to Tess Johnston
(1993: 86) and Wu Jiang (1997: 138),
in Asia, features a deep glass marquee and a square, opaque glass tower
McGregor Hall dates from the time when
illuminated from the inside at night. The overall composition consists of Hudec was employed at R. A. Curry.
McGregor Hall, therefore, would have
strong vertical and horizontal lines. The twenty-four-story Park Hotel/Joint
been completed by 1925 at the latest.
Savings Society Building (1934), with its characteristic setbacks, owes even
more to American Art Deco. The tallest building in China for more than
four decades, Park Hotel clearly evokes the American skyscraper, albeit on
a much smaller scale (fig. 3). Until the 1990s, the Grand Theatre and Park

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 Figure 3: Park Hotel (Johnston/Erh 1993: 95)

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Hotel, sitting almost cheek by jowl opposite the racecourse on Nanjing
Road, were the city's most recognizable landmarks.26 26 A little-known fact: since 1950,
Shanghai municipal surveyors have used
Given the pervasive American influence in Shanghai in the 1930s
the flag pole atop Park Hotel as the
and Hudec's association with American colleagues and clients, it is not starting point for measuring distances
from the city center. See Xinwen chenbao
unreasonable to see Hudec's Art Deco phase as a sudden qualitative
(July 8, 2001).
leap inspired by developments in New York and Chicago.27 However,
27 For two representative narratives of
this (Americentric) view ignores Hudec's Central European background. Hudec's American-inspired conversion to
Educated in the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hudec modernism, see Wu Jiang 1997: 138 and
Yang Bingde 2003: 210.
was almost certainly well familiar with Otto Wagner (1841-1918), Adolf
Loos (1870-1933), the Sezession movement, the Vienna Werkstätte, and
the general turn-of-century artistic ferment in his home country. His
embrace of Art Deco most likely did not mark so much a sudden conversion
to modernism - which most Chinese architectural historians allege - as
a natural extension of Hudec's Central European temperament and
background. Seen in this light, Hudec's earlier, unmistakably American, 28 Curry's Foncim Building is reflective of
his neoclassical style.
styles may well have originated from the wishes of his clients, aesthetically
unadventurous missionary organizations (the McTyeire School for Girls 29 It is instructive to view the Grand

Theatre side by side with the interior

and the Moore Memorial Church were both founded by the American
of Otto Wagner's celebrated Post
Methodist Episcopal Mission) and his senior colleague, R. A. Curry.28 The Office Savings Bank in Vienna: the two
show the same kind of refinement
collegiate Gothic, mock Tudor, and Georgian designs were more likely than
and sophisticated play with linear
not concessions to American provincialism by the young refugee architect compositions. Likewise, Hudec's Wu
Tongwen residence (1937) is strikingly
from one of the epicenters of artistic innovation in Europe. evocative of De La Warr Pavilion at

Significantly, all of Hudec's modern-style, if not full-fledged high Bexhill-on-Sea (1935) in England by two
other transplanted Central Europeans,
modernist, works - the Grand Theatre, Park Hotel, and the Wu Tongwen
Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff,
residence - were designed after he opened his own office for Chinese right down to the grand spiral staircase
and semicircular solarium. Further
clients, who were less wedded to Western historicist styles.29 Thus, the evidence of Hudec's familiarity with
Chinese (outdated, traditional) / Western (modern, progressive) binary European modernism includes his
expressionist New German Evangelical
collapses. A case could be made that in Shanghai, Chinese capitalists, Church (1931-32). For a description
"belated" by virtue of their nationality, were far more ready to accept and a photograph of the church, see
Warner 1994: 132-133. The church
modernism than at least some supposedly "advanced" Westerners. Western
was demolished during the Cultural
clients in Shanghai could not claim to have a lock on "modernity;" nor could Revolution.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 47

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 Hudec or other foreign architects working in Shanghai claim to be more
progressive than their Chinese colleagues. Fan Wenzhao's development,
for instance, closely mirrored that of Hudec's.
Like his exact contemporary Hudec, Fan Wenzhao (Robert Fan), a
graduate of the University of Pennsylvania class of 1921, went through
numerous revivalist styles before embracing modernism. One of his first
projects, the Shanghai YMCA building (1 927), a collaboration with two other
Chinese architects, was essentially Beaux Arts in overall composition with
superficial Chinese details. His Nanking Theatre (1928), dubbed the Chinese
Roxy by the New York Times, was a fluent exercise in Western neoclassicism.
His design for the Sun Yat-sen Memorial competition combined various
elements of Chinese religious and memorial architecture and placed second
to Lü Yanzhi's winning scheme. However, in 1933 - the year seems to have
been a turning point for more than one architect in Shanghai - a young
American, Carl Lindholm, a disciple of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Frank
Lloyd Wright, joined his firm. Fan held a press conference to introduce
Lindholm to the Shanghai media. The P.R. move was a great success: major
newspapers such as Shenbao and Shishi xinbao gave extensive coverage
to Lindholm's advocacy of the International Style and to Robert Fan and
30 For the press coverage and Lindholm's Lindholm's collaborative designs.30 That same year, another young architect
influence on Fan, see Lai 1995: 68.
joined the firm as a partner: a new graduate of Columbia University, Wu
Zi'ang (1908-1987) allegedly introduced Robert Fan to all the latest trends in
the New York architectural world. The following year, Robert Fan published
an article in which he criticized his plan with its "hodgepodge of Chinese
formulas" for the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and appealed to his colleagues to
avoid his mistake and called fora "completely new" architecture that totally
broke away from ossified traditionalism. A building, he continued, must
be designed from within, not from without. A design must be "scientific"
before it can be "beautiful." Fan traveled to Europe in 1935 and returned
from his trip even more committed to modernist architecture. His Georgia
and Yafa apartments and the Majestic (fig. 4) and Rialto theatres reflect

48 • The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture

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Figure 4: The Majestic (Johnston/Erh 1993: 89)

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 49

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31 Most Chinese accounts of Robert Fan's his departure from historicist architecture.31
conversion to modernism are based on

Wu Jiang (1997: 153-154). Wu Jiang,

The careers of Fan and Hudec in Shanghai suggest that the city
architectural historian and deputy contemporized Westerners and Chinese - that is, space overcame time.
director of Shanghai's Urban Planning
Bureau, is a grandson of Wu Zi'ang. It is
Although in the global context, China lagged behind the West, in
also interesting to remember that it was cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese architects could
in 1932 that Philip Johnson christened
the new modernist architecture "the stake a strong claim of contemporaneity with their foreign-born colleagues.
International Style" in association Indeed, Chinese architects trained under modernist masters could even
with the exhibition at the MOMA in

New York. From the American point of

claim direct lineage over expatriate architects who were forced to be
view, modernism was, therefore, the autodidacts. Rather than stuck in the "dark ages," a few native architects,
"latest," the most cutting-edge form of
architecture. Both Majestic and Rialto
including Xi Fuquan (1903-1983), were modernists from the beginning
show significant traces of Art Deco. The instead of converting midway.
Georgia and Yafa were more stripped-
down modernist. By training as well as timing, Xi had even stronger modernist credentials
than Hudec. Xi was schooled in Germany, a hotbed of modernist architecture.
Xi had studied German at Tongji Middle School before attending Darmstadt
University and the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1921
to 1 929. Darmstadt, of course, was a center of German Expressionism. Both
Darmstadt and Berlin were linked to Peter Behrens and other avant-garde
German architects. His first major work, the Hongqiao Sanatorium (1934),
was a textbook modernist structure and far more radical than Hudec's Art

Deco Grand Theatre completed a year earlier. Whereas Grand Theatre was
a mid-career design by a seasoned architect, Hongqiao Sanatorium was a
"debut" work of a younger practitioner. Surprisingly, however, although
Hudec's shadow looms large in Shanghai, the works of the Chinese architect
Xi Fuquan, a native son of the city, are little known except for his sanatorium
and a pair of high-profile buildings, the National Museum of Art (now
Jiangsu Museum of Art) and the National Grand Assembly Hall (Guomin
da huitang; now the Jiangsu Great Hall of the People), in the Republican
capital Nanjing. The neglect of Xi Fuquan is all the more astonishing
considering his large corpus of works in his hometown; the Shanghai Local
History Office (Shanghai difangzhi bangongshi) credits Xi with more than
fifty residences, three six- to nine-story apartment buildings, three post

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offices, one hangar (in addition to one he built in Xi'an), and twenty-four
cylindrical warehouses for one of Shanghai's largest flour mills.
Xi Fuquan's relative obscurity may be attributed to the fact that he
designed few public buildings in Shanghai. After 1949, Xi worked for
the Light Industries Design Institute in Shanghai and became associated
almost exclusively with industrial design, building factories all over China
in Nanping, Wuhu, Nanjing, and Xi'an as well as abroad in Guinea, Albania,
the Philippines, and Nepal on foreign-aid projects supported by the PRC
government.32 Unfortunately, photographic records of Xi's works are hard 32 See the government-sponsored office's
website: http://www.shtong.gov.cn/
to find, apart from the Hongqiao Sanatorium, the National Museum of node2/node2245/node4482

Art, and the National Grand Assembly Hall, two public projects similar in /node54728 /node60565/node60567/

userobject1ai49066.html.
mass and exterior conception. Today, Xi Fuquan is known in architectural
history books primarily for his Hongqiao Sanatorium, one of the earliest
and purest works of Chinese modernism (fig. 5).
Xi's design with 1 00 beds for tuberculosis patients consisted of a four-
story main building and a two-story annex. The main building contained
operating theaters, an X-ray room, and several therapy rooms on the north
side, leaving the sunny southern exposure for the patients' living quarters.
Each floor was set back to allow patients to sunbathe. To ensure privacy,
each balcony had a translucent canopy. The design was clearly driven by
function. Befitting a facility for infectious diseases, the two buildings of
the sanatorium were separated from each other. There was no emphasis
on a central axis or on symmetry; nor was there any superficial decoration.
The Hongqiao Sanatorium was truly a case of form following function.33 33 For a full description of the sanatorium,
see Yang Bingde 2003: 127-128.
Even the National Grand Assembly Hall and the National Museum of Art in
Nanjing (both built in 1936), especially their interiors, were highly rational,
functional designs despite the cornices and simplified Chinese arches atop
the three glass windows on the main facades, obligatory nods to "national
essence" (fig. 6).

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 Figure 5: Hongqiao Sanatorium, renderings (Yang Bingde/Cai Meng 2003: 129)

52 • The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture

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Figure 6: iiangsu Museum of Art (formerly National Museum of Art); from: http://www.
aaart.com.cn/cn/bbs/dispbbs.asp?boardlD=5&ID=162 (last accessed June 24, 2006)

A Tale of Two Cities: Nationalist and Modernist Architecture in

Nanjing and Shanghai, 1927-1937
The same kind of political pressure to give form to an easily legible Chinese
national architectural style affected other architects (all but a few based
in Shanghai) who sought to work under the auspices of the Nanjing
government. Indeed, throughout the so-called Nanjing decade (1927-1937),
the two cities were constantly at odds on political and economic fronts.3434 On the tension between Nanjing
and Shanghai, particularly the city's
The tension also manifested itself in cultural spheres, architecture being
capitalist class, see Coble 1980. Coble
no exception. A curious phenomenon in Republican architecture is theshows that far from being close allies
of the Shanghai economic elite, the
schizophrenic split between Nanjing and Shanghai: the same architects KMT suppressed the capitalists' political
simultaneously executed radically different designs in the two cities,aspirations
a through control of their
organizations and seized many of their
situation European high modernists would have found incomprehensible.
financial and industrial enterprises in
Although nationalism and modernism may be philosophically incompatible,
order to fill the state coffers.

because they were practical professionals, Xi Fuquan and his fellow

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 53

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 architects served up Chinese decorative motifs - even Chinese roof
columns, and brackets - to suit the Nanjing government's agenda, wherea
for Shanghai's industrialist and professional classes they built cool, sleek
modernist structures.

Perhaps no architect experienced the tension between official

promotion of nationalism and private espousal of cosmopolitan modernism
more acutely than Dong Dayou (1899-1973), "official" architect of Shanghai
under the Nationalist government. Dong built a thoroughly modernist
house for himself, yet his name became forever attached to a very different
group of public buildings on the outskirts of Shanghai. Educated at the
University of Minnesota (M.A. in architecture, class of 1925) and Columbia
(graduate courses in art history and archeology), upon returning to China
in 1928, Dong opened his own office in Shanghai. Unlike most Chinese
architects of his generation, Dong received a critical boost from the
government from the very beginning of his career. His reputation during
the Republican era was built almost entirely on a series of municipal
commissions in Shanghai. Dong, therefore, figured large in the Nationalist
conservative cultural landscape in the Western-dominated metropolis.
To contain the International Settlement and the French Concession and

create a new city center to rival the foreign-controlled areas of Shanghai,

the Nationalist government drafted an ambitious master plan for the
development of greater Shanghai in 1 930. The first phase of the plan called
35 See Wu Jiang 1997: 168-170 and for a new port, traffic arteries, and municipal facilities.35 A competition was
Rowe/Kuan 2002: 50-53.
held for the design of a new city hall. The city government directed Dong
Dayou, consultant to the Commission on the Construction of Shanghai
City Center (Shanghai shizhongxin quyu jianshe weiyuanhui), to revise the
winning entry by Zhao Shen and Sun Ximing. The brief of the competition
stipulated that the city hall be designed in the Chinese style, and that it
embody Chinese culture:

Architectural style is where a country's cultural spirit resides.

Therefore, each country's architecture expresses its unique

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 national character. In recent years Chinese architecture has shown
a tendency to be taken over by Europe and America, which must
be corrected with great effort in order to fulfill our duty to
promote our country's culture. Municipal architecture must be in
Chinese style to set an example for the people of Shanghai, (in
Yang Bingde 2003: 323)

In on other words, the government sought to remake Shanghai in the

image of Nanjing.36 The resulting design by Dong Dayou was a mishmash 36 For a study of urban planning and
construction in Nanjing, see Musgrove
of Chinese imperial architectural motifs. The city hall (1 933) (fig. 7), library 2000: 139-160.

(1935), and museum (1935) - the last two also designed by Dong - were
impractical, difficult, and hugely expensive to build, but their influence
was long lasting.37 37 As Yang Bingde (2003: 325-326) points
out six decades later, the West Train
Chinese revivalism, however, never caught on in Shanghai. The
Station in Beijing was built with similarly
Communist government abandoned the plan to shift the city center elaborate Chinese roofs and watchtowers

albeit on top of a massive multistory

northeastward. Looking quaint and anachronistic today on the edge of
concrete box. Dong Dayou was criticized
the city, the city hall, library, and museum were turned over to several for the cost overruns associated with the

construction of the group of municipal

educational institutions. Ironically, after achieving great fame with his
projects. On the high costs of nationalist
architecture in general including the Sun
Yat-sen Mausoleum, the Sun Yat-sen
Memorial Hall, and Nationalist municipal
buildings in Shanghai, see also Lai 1995:
58-59.

Figure 7: Shanghai City Hall (Yang Bingde 2003: 325)

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 55

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 group of public projects, to which one must also add the municipal stadium
completed in 1935, Dong Dayou turned to unadulterated modernism when
he built his own house in the same year (fig. 8). In contrast, the Nationalist
mayor of Shanghai, Wu Tiechang, an ardent promoter of architectural
nationalism, put his preaching into practice and asked Dong to design a
Chinese-style mansion for him.
The divide between Nanjing state-sponsored nationalism and Shanghai
capitalist-endorsed modernism also played out in the work of the Allied
Architects. The biggest Chinese architectural firm in Shanghai, it was
founded in 1932 by three graduates of the University of Pennsylvania,
Zhao Shen (1898-1978), Tong Jun (1900-1983), and Chen Zhi (1902-2002).
Until it folded two decades later, the firm was active not only in Shanghai
but also in Nanjing and the interior. Although all were products of the
Beaux Arts system, the partners "agreed to reject the (Chinese) big roof"
(Chen Zhi 2000: 4).

Figure 8: Dong Dayou Residence; from: http://www.china-designer.com/vip/myblog_all.

asp?accountid=56149&id=14968; (last accessed June 24, 2006)

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 The firm made news in Shanghai with its modernist banks and
cinemas. One of its first projects, the Hengli Bank (1933), was described as
"completely in the latest German and Dutch style" (in Luo Xiaowei 1996:
83). The facade of the Metropol Cinema (1933) (fig. 9) featured eight
vertical neon light beams; the interior was equally streamlined. The
Chekiang (Zhejiang) First Commercial Bank (1948) was a handsome eight-
story structure faced with dark brown brick. White sills ran along the main

Figure 9: The Metropol (Yang Bingde 2003: 219)

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 facade, and vertically was emphasized on the narrow secondary north
facade (fig. 10).
The Allied Architects' Nanjing projects were much more complicated
affairs. Most were public commissions. The Foreign Ministry building, for
example, represented a compromise between the firm's commitment to
modernism and the government's demand for explicit nationalism. The
overall composition was remarkably conservative in that it was tripartite
both horizontally and vertically (fig. 11). (Common in Western classical
architecture, this compositional style consists of a base, a midsection, a roof
with a cornice and a pediment, etc; horizontal tripartite composition can
include two symmetrical side sections flanking a prominent midsection.)
The ground floor was meant to evoke the traditional xumi podium in stone.
The roof was indeed flat, but the cornice re-created in brick the traditional

Figure 10: Chekiang First Commercial bracket system. The interior had colorful painted ceilings and vermilion
Bank (Luo 1996: 77)
columns in the Qing manner. All these elements satisfied the client's wish
for a modern yet clearly Chinese building befitting its function as a symbol
38 On the Foreign Ministry building, see of the new Republic.38 In the Foreign Ministry Building, the essentially
Yang Bingde 2003: 327-330; Musgrove
Beaux Arts scheme eschewed the full-blown Chinese revivalism of an earlier
2000: 150-151; and Rowe/Kuan 2002: 81.
design by the celebrated Chinese architect Yang Tingbao (1901-1982), a
fellow graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, but was a far cry from
39 In December 1929, the National the firm's work in Shanghai.39
Capital Planning Office published the
Tong Jun (2000: 8), perhaps the most scholarly of the three partners,
Capital City Plan, which, among other
things, recommended that government wrote in 1946 about the difficulty of creating modern yet Chinese
buildings be built in modified classic
architecture. He saw the Chinese women's qipao as an apt analogy for this
Chinese style. See Musgrove 2000: 147,
Lai 1995: 57-58. ideal synthesis. The qipao, he wrote, was "practical and beautiful without
being devoid of local color" (8). An ethnic Manchu himself, Tong neglected
to point out that although completely sinicized by the twentieth century,
the form-fitting qipao was actually Manchu in origin, and with its stiff,
high collar and high slits, was far from practical for working women. Tong
lamented that Chinese architects had yet to re-create in architectural terms
what their wives had achieved with their dress. Instead, all too frequently

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Figure 11: Foreign Ministry Building (Musgrove 2000: 151)

they resorted to "cubism and Hollywood backdrops" (8). He was equally

critical of officials who had a "feudal" taste for Chinese palace-style public
buildings. To superimpose a big roof on top of Western walls as an exemplar
of modern Chinese public architecture was a copout# facile and ultimately
unsatisfactory: "If the palace style roof was blown away by a hurricane,
pray tell where the Chinese character would reside in what's left standing?
What we hope for is public architecture that is recognizably Chinese without 40 Tong's article first appeared in
1946 in the journal Gonggong
tiled roofs, bracket systems ( dougong ), and stone podiums (xumizuo)" (8).
gongcheng zhuankan (Journal of public
Tong Jun reminded the reader that it was Western architects who came construction). It was reprinted in 2000
in Jianzhushi. American architects Henry
up with the pseudosolution of applying superficial Chinese motifs, heavy
K, Murphy and Harry Hussey, along
Chinese roofs in particular, atop Western "piles of walls" in their designs with the Englishman Fred Rowntree, are
credited as pioneers of this type of style.
for missionary universities. Western architects, however well meaning
To downplay their foreign character.
they were, had no appreciation for the spirit of Chinese architecture. Christian missionary organizations hired
Murphy, Hussey, and Rowntree to design
Tong expressed the wish that "this kind of style should become obsolete
Chinese-style buildings for missionary
in Chinese public architecture in the future."40 university campuses (Yang Bingde 2003:
260-286; Lai 1995: 54-55). For Murphy's
He proved to be prematurely optimistic: his own firm failed to achieve
career in China, see Cody 2001. See also
the lofty goal of a modern yet Chinese vocabulary. Like the firm's foreign Hussey's 1968 memoir. Both Lü Yanzhi
and Dong Dayou worked as Murphy's
ministry building, the Allied Architects' Sun Yat-sen House of Culture and
assistants before breaking out on their
Education in Nanjing was in modified Chinese style sans big roof. Its projects own (Lai 1995: 55).

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 in Shanghai were unabashedly Western modernist (Yang Bingde 2003: 330).
Few architects, if any, in the Republican era succeeded in forging a truly
Chinese design philosophy based on local exigencies. Although Xi Fuquan's
sanatorium was elegant and thoughtful, it borrowed its conception from the
West, including the Northern European, Teutonic belief in the restorative,
health-giving powers of the sun despite Shanghai's significantly different
climate. Instead of deriving his scheme from native innovations in tubercular
treatment or traditional Chinese therapeutic traditions, Xi Fuquan turned
41 It is not known to what extent to the West for inspiration.41 To most new converts, modernism was simply
Xi was familiar with Alvar Aalto's
the latest style, notwithstanding Gropius's denial.
famous sanatorium in Paimio, Finland,
completed in 1933, a year earlier than The awareness of the need to emphasize local problems and local
his own sanatorium in Shanghai.
solutions would not emerge until the founding in 1 942 of the architectural
program at Shanghai's St. John's University by one of Gropius's disciples,
Huang Zuoshen. Huang occupies an important place in Chinese narratives
of modernist architecture. To Shanghai architects, particularly those
affiliated with Tongji University, Huang represents a direct link to Bauhaus
and European modernism in general. Through Huang and Feng Jizhong,
another crucial figure in the development of the architectural department
at the university, Tongji is able to construct a modernist tradition in contrast
to its rivals in Beijing and elsewhere.

Bauhaus in Shanghai
The systematic introduction of Bauhaus to Shanghai is credited to one
man, Huang Zuoshen (Henry Jorshen Huang, 1915-1975), younger brother
of the theater director Huang Zuolin. The youngest child of an affluent
family in Tianjin, Huang Zuoshen attended a French Catholic school from
age five until he left for England at age fourteen. After completing
secondary education in Cambridge, Huang studied for five years at the
A. A. (Architectural Association) in London. Even before Gropius arrived
in England in 1934, Huang was already closely following the latest moves
of the young wave makers of the day, B. Lubetkin, E. M. Fry, and F. R. S.

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Yorke, but it did not take long for him to succumb to Gropius's idealism
and charisma. When Gropius left for Harvard, Huang followed and
enrolled at the Graduate School of Design, where he came into contact
with all the architectural greats, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar
Aalto. Huang later visited Le Corbusier in his office in Paris. Huang's early
work, the dormitory for the Bank of China, for instance, is said to reflect
Le Corbusier's influence. Huang was also friends with Marcel Breuer and
considered him a genius.42 42 The most detailed account of Huang
Zuoshen's career is by a former student,
In 1942, Huang returned to China and accepted an invitation from Luo Xiaowei, herself a noted architectural

the Dean of the School of Engineering of St. John's University to start historian at Tongji University in Shanghai
(Luo/Qian 2003).
a department of architecture. From 1942 to 1951, when the American
missionary university was disbanded, he was chairman of the department
and the only full-time teacher; he taught everything from theory and
design to rendering. Huang invited practicing architects to assist him at
St. John's. Perhaps the most important part-time instructor was Richard
Paulick, a German communist who had worked with Gropius in Dessau
before both were driven out of Germany by the Nazis. Paulick ended up
in Shanghai and worked for the city's planning bureau. Appropriately, he
offered courses in urban planning and interior design.43 Apart from Paulick 43 According to Luo Xiaowei and Li Dehua
(2004: 25), it might have been Gropius
and a few other part-timers, Huang was the architecture department. Thus who introduced Paulick to the Dean of

to all intents and purposes, Huang single-handedly shaped and molded the School of Engineering. Paulick left
Shanghai after the Second World War
his students.
and became a noted architect in East

Huang's curriculum was almost completely derived from Bauhaus; there Germany. He designed, among other
things, the Stalinist broad boulevard
was even a preparatory course in material and form. One of his students in East Berlin, the Karl-Marx-Allee. For
(Luo/Qian 2003: 51) recalls that her first assignment was titled "pattern and a biography of Richard Paulick, see
Manfred Muller 1975.
texture." Unbeknownst to her, Huang was merely following Johannes Itten,
who had introduced the obligatory Vorkurs at the Bauhaus.44 Originality 44 For a brief description of Itten's beliefs
and his Vorkurs , see Whitford 2000: 51-
was stressed over imitation, which is why Huang rejected the term 59.

"modern style" in favor of "contemporary architecture." To him, the word

"modern" ( moderig ) had come to connote a fad in style-obsessed Shanghai.
"Authentic modern architecture is a spirit (Zeitgeist), an aspiration, not

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 a modish style or a school," he told his students. Huang understood the
concept of "modern" to be static; "contemporary," on the other hand, was
45 Huang's rejection of "modernist dynamic (Luo/Qian 2003: 54).45 Therefore, students were encouraged to
architecture" reads almost like a
come up with their solutions through investigating the site, interviewing
paraphrase of Gropius, who famously
stressed that the "object of the Bauhaus the client, observing the client at work, etc. Assignments were based on
was not to propagate any 'style',
real-life scenarios. Students recall one specific assignment, designing an
system, dogma, formula, or vogue, but
simply to exert a revitalizing influence OB-GYN clinic. Huang invited Amos Wang, a famous obstetrician who
on design" (Gropius 1965: 92).
was planning to reconstruct his clinic, to provide the brief for the project.
Students visited Wang's clinic and surveyed the doctors, nurses, and patients
before embarking on their own designs. Huang also required his students
to make models for each project (52).
To develop students' ability to work with their hands, Huang started a
pottery class at the elite missionary university whose students were better
known for having wealthy parents than a passion for crafts. Although from
an affluent comprador family himself, Huang is remembered as a man with
"a strong plebeian spirit" (Luo/Qian 2003: 52). He saw the contemporary
architect as playing the role of social reformer. In an unpublished English
manuscript, "The Training of an Architect," Huang wrote that the architect's
task was to mobilize all possible new technologies to provide the masses
with commodious space, good light, and all necessary amenities. He
should respect their lifestyle and use all architectural/aesthetical means to
satisfy their need for beauty (52). Instead of visiting museums or memorial
architecture, Huang took his students to one of the worst slums in Shanghai
and asked them to think about ways to ameliorate the living conditions
there. Huang's idealism, his attention to solving real problems, and his
emphasis on modeling instead of architectural rendering indicate the
unmistakable Bauhaus orientation of St. John's curriculum.

Huang's tenure was cut short by the 1951 dissolution of missionary

schools and the reorganization of higher education along Soviet lines
a year later. Huang became deputy chairman of the newly constituted
department of architecture at Tongji University (the position of chairman

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was left vacant) for a brief while before he was effectively sidelined
and persecuted, along with untold numbers of intellectuals with similar
backgrounds, before and during the Cultural Revolution. Huang died of a
cerebral hemorrhage a month before his sixtieth birthday.
Beyond the Bauhaus-St. John's-Tongji lineage, Huang's true gift to
his students was perhaps his commitment to the here and now. Although
his Bauhaus-inspired curriculum may have seemed international and
outward-looking, it also was national (without being nationalist) and
inward-looking because it encouraged students to find practical solutions
to real problems. That is why when Huang's protégés did draw on native
traditions, instead of imperial palaces they turned to vernacular and
regional architecture because the latter was shaped by specific geographic
and climate conditions. The design results may have been local (and
by definition, modern and Chinese), but the principles were global in
implication. Huang's twin legacies were to have a formative influence on
generations of architects in Shanghai.46 46 As noted earlier, Huang's disciple Li
Dehua incorporated elements of Chinese
courtyard houses in his design for the
"The Way of Tongji Architecture" Tongji Faculty club (1956). Shanghai
architects were among the first in
Huang was not widely known in China until the recent spate of articles the country to draw on vernacular
architecture.
and books commemorating the legacy of Chinese modernism and Tongji
University's role in upholding the modernist tradition in the 1950s and
1960s. Although well respected in architectural circles, Feng Jizhong,
Huang's successor at Tongji, was similarly obscure to the general public. His
reputation was eclipsed by Liang Sicheng and Yang Tingbao at Tsinghua
and Dongnan (Southeast, formerly Central) University. Feng's students
sought to rectify the situation. Remembrances by former students as
well as personal recollections became an important part of institutional
history, in which personal, institutional, and local prestige were closely
intertwined. Feng was celebrated as another pivotal figure in Tongji's
modernist development.
In 2003, as part of the commemorative events celebrating the fiftieth

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 anniversary of the founding of Tongji's Department of Architecture, the
then Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Wang Bowei,
a former student of Feng Jizhong, orchestrated the publication of a series
of books, including two on the life and work of Feng Jizhong. In his
foreword, Wang elaborates on the significance of the two books to Tongji's
institutional memory: like monuments and memorial ceremonies, written
words can serve as reminders of an organization's cherished tradition and
47 The same foreword is included in the
mission.47 Published three months apart, both books are characterized by a
two books (Feng 2003a; Feng 2003 b). All
references are to the Chinese version of deeply personal tone. Narrated in the first person and copiously illustrated,
the bilingual edition. Life of an Architect is based on interviews with Feng by his former students.
The book is part autobiography, part memoir. Even in Pillars of Architecture
(Jianzhu xianzhu; xianzhu being literally the neck of a stringed instrument),
an anthology mainly of Feng's architectural designs and writings on urban
planning and landscaping, a distinctly individual voice and persona come
48 The book also includes Feng's notes through.48 The voice and persona are those of an urbane, sophisticated
on poetry and a small collection of
internationalist able to negotiate among multiple identities with ease.
correspondence.
Although Feng was born in Kaifeng, Henan, his life and career are
inseparable from Shanghai, where he grew up and received his primary
and secondary education. Feng is multicultural and multilingual, fluent
in English, German, Mandarin, and Shanghai dialect. He recalls being
frequently drafted as a boy by his school drama teachers in Shanghai
because he was one of the few pupils capable of speaking Mandarin (Feng
2003a: 12). Even though a Northerner by background, he cannot decide if
he identifies more with the North or South, or rather if it is a nonissue for
him. Numerous old black-and-white photographs included in Life of an
Architect show a dapper young man studying, relaxing, and vacationing
with European classmates in multiethnic Austria. Feng speaks about having
Austrian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, Romanian,
French, and Danish friends, yet he insists that he never lost sense of his
Chineseness (Feng 2003a: 23-24).
Feng is strikingly similar to Huang Zuoshen in background. Huang, as

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we recall, was educated in French from age five to fourteen in Mandarin-
speaking Tianjin before leaving for England and, later, the United States
(Luo/Qian 2003: 47). His students remember Huang as a cosmopolitan and 49 Huang was far from being a dandy. He
preferred rough textures. He designed
cultured man who often sported a Tyrolean hat, an English nylon (a new
a simple but highly functional uniform
material at the time) umbrella, and a wicker briefcase. When Huang visited using Chinese indigo-dyed cloth, which
became the rage in the Department
Le Corbusier in Paris, the two chatted in French. Huang and Feng were
of Architecture at Tongji. One student
equally fond of Debussy, Mahler, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, and Peking recalls being introduced by Huang to
modernist art and music rarely seen and
Opera, and appreciated Song landscape paintings as much as Matisse,
heard in Shanghai (Luo/Qian 2003: 54-
Picasso, and Ozenfant.49 The multilingual and multicultural background 55). Feng (2003a: 12) is knowledgeable
about both Western and Chinese opera
of Huang and Feng goes a long toward explaining their comfort with
and compares the Spanish tenor Jose
modernism. The dichotomy between modernism and nationalism was Carreras to Cheng Yanqiu and Luciano
Pavarotti to Mei Lanfang.
specious to them; one did not necessarily preclude the other. Neither
Feng nor Huang felt the need to wear their Chineseness on their sleeves 50 It is interesting to note that Liang

or resort to overt nationalism in their work.50 Sicheng, who is fairly or unfairly

associated with the Big Roof, sees
Although these reminiscences are intensely personal, they are also part traditional Chinese architecture with

its non-load-bearing walls and modular

of institutional memory. They form part of the university's symbolic capital.51
construction as inherently compatible
Taking stock of Tongji's modernist legacy, Shidai jianzhu (also known by its with modernism. Unfortunately, few of
his colleagues, or even himself, were able
English name, Time + Architecture) devoted a special issue (Nov. 2004) to
or allowed to explore the implications of
"The Way of Tongji Architecture." The editor-in-chief justifies the special this assertion. Unlike earlier Republican
critics, who dismissed traditional Chinese
issue on the grounds that Tongji University's School of Architecture and
architecture as "unscientific," Liang
Urban Planning is one of the strongest and most influential in China. Sicheng and Lin Huiyin had great respect
for the rationality and standardization of
Therefore, the theme transcends the narrow boundary of one institution
classical Chinese construction (Lai 1995:
and examines a "Chinese topic" ( Zhongguo huati). Despite the appearance49-50, 70).

of "self-promotion" - most of the contributors are intimately connected

** Feng repeatedly stresses that
to the university, and the journal itself is based at Tongji - the editor architecture, like all art, is intensely
personal, although architecture
continues, the authors adopt a critical attitude in their analysis of the Tongji
frequently requires collaborators.
phenomenon (Zhi 2004: 1 3). What emerges from the twenty-two articles on However, the collaboration should not
be at the expense of personal vision.
Tongji's history, development, and special character is a fascinating piece
Therefore, an architect cannot have too
of institutional history writing, which stresses the university's differences many collaborators (Feng 2003a: 86;
2003 b: 92). On Chinese modernism and
from its counterparts in China, particularly Tsinghua and Dongnan with
symbolic or cultural capital, see Shih
their equally illustrious histories and reputations. 2001: 68.

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 The articles are united in presenting Tongji as the lone institutional
torchbearer of modernism in China through the university's direct lineage
from Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and its oppositional role in Chinese
architectural history. Unlike Tsinghua and Dongnan, heirs to the Beaux
Arts system - Liang Sicheng, founder of the Department of Architecture at
Tsinghua, and Yang Tingbao and Tong Jun at Dongnan, all graduated from
the University of Pennsylvania - Tongji had among its leadership some of
the most committed modernists in China. In addition to Huang Zuoshen,
Feng Jizhong (191 5-), Jin Jingchang (1 91 0-2000), and Luo Weidong exerted
profound influence at Tongji, especially Feng Jizhong, who was chairman
52 Jin Jingchangf who trained at of the Department of Architecture for almost three decades (1 955-1 981 ).52
Darmstadt University, was one of the
And whereas its rivals were paternalistic, Tongji was democratic and
pioneers in urban planning in China and
a respected photographer. Upon joining pluralistic, boasting faculty trained in England, Germany, Austria, France,
Tongji in 1956, Luo Weidong, who had
studied with Mies van der Rohe at the
the United States, and Japan. There were no stern father figures watching
Illinois Institute of Technology and over the Department of Architecture at Tongji. Although commanding
briefly worked in Mies's office, taught
great respect from their colleagues, Huang Zuoshen and Feng Jizhong did
design principles. His arrival sparked
great interest in Mies among the not stand out in terms of overwhelming seniority.
students. See Lu Yongyi 2004: 28. Luo
Tongji's diversity, a result of the reorganization of higher education
left Tongji for Hong Kong shortly before
the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, earned its faculty the nickname "the Eight-Power Allied
(Feng Jizhong 2003a: 44).
Forces" ( baguo lianjun of the Boxer Rebellion). The university, which had
a department of civil engineering and offered courses in urban planning
and architecture - taught by Feng Jizhong and Jin Jingchang - to juniors
and seniors before 1952, inherited the architectural programs from two
disbanded missionary universities, St. John's and Hangchow Christian
College (Zhijiang daxue). The Department of Architecture at Hangchow
Christian College had been headed by Chen Zhi of the Allied Architects
and was essentially Beaux Arts in its curriculum. Rather than undermine St.
John's and Tongji's modernist orientation, however, the heterogeneity of
the newly constituted Department of Architecture at Tongji is said to have
made the university the only site of resistance to Soviet academicism in the
1 950s. In contrast, other universities quickly went along with the new state-

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reinforced orthodoxy. Soviet academicism, which descended from French
Beaux Arts, did not represent a radical departure for architectural programs
on most Chinese college campuses. "The way Tongji of architecture,"
therefore, is defined in oppositional terms. The university's peers are cast
as conservative and orthodox whereas Tongji is described as progressive
and nonconformist.

The neat dichotomy between Beaux Arts (Other) and Bauhaus (Self)
obscures a much more complex picture of the struggle at Tongji and beyond.
As one insider acknowledges, not all faculty educated under Beaux Arts
S3 The Tongji- and Shanghai-centered
were diehard conservatives; nor was Tongji completely immune to Soviet narrative of Chinese modernism leaves

academicism or its Chinese iteration, the so-called Big Roof craze (Qianout modernist attempts in other parts
of the country. In Beijing, for instance,
2004: 20). In fact, there was considerable struggle within Tongji. However,
Yang Tingbao, the venerable University
the struggle on and off Tongji's campus on behalf of modernism becomes of Pennsylvania graduate, built the
Peace Hotel in 1952. The French-educated
strong evidence of the university's difference from its Others.53 Several
Hua Lanhong designed the Children's
incidents, in particular, are often repeated to illustrate Tongji's valiant,Hospital also in Beijing. Hua Lanhong
was prominent in Beijing's planning and
even quixotic efforts at resistance.
architectural circles and was particularly
In 1954, the university administration approved the plan proposed by contemptuous of Soviet architecture and
planning, describing them as "outdated"
some of the faculty to erect a huge pile on Tongji's campus in the manner
and "inferior" (Wang Jun 2003: 213-214).
of Moscow University's landmark building, albeit with Chinese big roofs
54 The opposition to the "Big Roof" on
and decorative details. However, more than ten professors wrote to Premier
the Tongji campus has been written
Zhou Enlai and succeeded in stopping the project.54 In 1958, the planning about in many sources (Qian Feng 2004:
20; Feng Jizhong 2003a: 44).
of the Tian'anmen Square in Beijing likewise met with criticism at Tongji.
Six architects from Shanghai (Wu Jingxiang, Feng Jizhong, Huang Zuoshen,55 Xue Qiuli 2004: 77. Wang Jun (2003:
271-272) describes Chairman Mao's
Tan Yuan, Zhao Shen, and Chen Zhi, all but the last two formally affiliated
grandiosity by pointing out his fixation
with Tongji) signed a letter expressing their concern that the scale of the on the number "ten thousand" in his

poetry. The building brief for the Great

proposed square, 500 meters wide, was inhuman (Wang Jun 2003: 279-280).
Hall of the People, a typical Mao project
Tongji professors were also critical of Beijing's much-vaunted "Ten Great was extremely vague. The requirements
called for an auditorium capable of
Architectural Works" (Shi da jianzhu) pushed by CCP in the 1950s. Tan Yuan
seating ten thousand and a banquet hall
dismissed the buildings' grandiose size with a cutting remark: "Vastness
seating five thousand. The rest was left
to the architects. On the construction of
doesn't equal greatness" (juda bushi weida).55 Unlike the backward-looking
Tian'anmen Square as a political space,
design adopted for the Great Hall of the People, Feng Jizhong, Huangsee Wu Hung 2005.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 67

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 Zuoshen, and Zhao Hanguang from Tongji proposed a modernist structure
with glass curtain walls meant to "symbolize democratic transparency" (fig.
56 Qian Feng 2004: 21. For the front 12). Alas, they were "ahead of their time" (chao qian).56 One contributor
elevation and ground plan of Tongji's
to the special issue comments on the irony: progressive rationalist ideals
scheme, see Qian Feng 2004: 23; Feng
Jizhong 2003a: 52-53. Liang Sicheng were criticized as "typical bourgeois thinking," and conservative, feudal
suggested a ranking system for the
dynastic big roof styles were heralded as "proletarian" (Wu Zhiqiang 2004:
proposals for the Great Hall of the
People: Chinese but modern (zhong
erxin), Western but modern, Chinese
and archaic {zhong er gu ), Western
and archaic with Chinese but modern

being the most desirable; Western

and archaic the least desirable. In

the end, the proposal accepted was

both Western and archaic. Liang also
criticized the proportion of the design
(Wang Jun 2003: 278). Half a century
later, Feng Jizhong (2003a: 52-53)
described Tongji's design as Chinese in
spirit notwithstanding its sleek, modern
appearance, which would put it in
Liang's Chinese but modern category.

Figure 12: Tongji Proposal for the Great Hall of the People (Qian Feng 2004: 23)

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32) Modernism is thus seen as politically progressive and economically
rational, whereas national style is feudal. The inescapable conclusion is
that of all the architectural programs in China, it is Tongji that embodies
the May Fourth values of democracy and science.57 57 Most of the Big Ten sport various
Chinese motifs, some with Chinese
One commentator declares that he harbors no hostility toward
big roofs, e.g., the Museum of Art
Tsinghua and (half-jokingly?) urges it to "keep its strong sense of mission and the Agricultural Exhibition Hall.
Wu Zhiqiang (2004: 32) points out the
vis-à-vis the state, politics, and the nation as well as its close ties to the
leftist and Communist leanings of many
central government and the planning of the capital city" (Xue 2004: 77). Bauhaus members. Many champions of
modernist architecture in Europe were
Meanwhile, Tongji should continue to walk down the path of liberalism
indeed politically progressive, but it is
( ziyouzhuyi ). Furthermore, commentators attribute the philosophical also important to remember that one of
the most iconic modernist structures is
differences among the Big Three of China's architectural programs to the
the Fascist party headquarters in Como,
subtle influence of environment, both micro and macro. At the macro Italy, designed by Giuseppe Terragni.
Although the Nazis detested modernism,
level, the three universities are shaped by their particular locations
Mussolini was more accepting of it. For
in Beijing (Tsinghua), Nanjing (Dongnan), and Shanghai (Tongji). Ma the complicated relationship between
architecture and totalitarianism in the
Qingyun sees Tongji as a quintessential product of Shanghai. To Ma, cities
twentieth century, see Sudjic 2005.
are synonymous with pluralism and tolerance. Shanghai is the most urban
and, therefore, most open-minded of all China's cities.58 At the micro level, 58 Ma Qingyun 2004: 79. Ma graduated
from Tsinghua and the University of
Tsinghua's Department of Architecture is housed in a grandiose building
Pennsylvania. One of the most talked-
at the end of a central axis on the university campus in Beijing, and its about young architects in China, he is
now based in Shanghai.
sister department at Dongnan claims a Republican Beaux-Arts compound
in Nanjing. The home of Tongji's Department of Architecture, however,
is a "replica of the (Dessau) Bauhaus."59 Indeed, Wenyuan lou (Wenyuan 59 See Xue Qiuli 2004: 77. Xue is a Tongji
graduate who now teaches at the City
Hall), constructed in 1953, has become a badge of honor for Tongji (fig.
University of Hong Kong.
13). The current Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning
at Tongji, Wu Zhiqiang (2004: 31-33), likewise asserts that being in the
Wenyuan Hall for four years or more constitutes in itself an education in
modernism. Wu describes the building as a "sacred spiritual temple" and
writes about visiting the Dessau Bauhaus and finding connections and
parallels between the two buildings. Wu insisted on placing four Breuer's
Vassily chairs in one of the conference rooms at the School and claims that
only those ignorant of the "Tongji Bauhaus tradition" would sit in the

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 69

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 Figure 13: Wenyuan Hall (Wu Zhiqiang 2004: 30)

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chairs and reveal themselves as uninitiated outsiders ( wairen ).60 60 Wu 2004: 31-33. Wu strongly asserts
Tongji's authentic, unquestionably
modernist, in particular, Bauhaus
Tongji and Shanghai Exceptionalism credentials. Wu graduated from Tongji
and received his postgraduate education
The proudly-told story of Tongji as the exclusive Chinese member of in Germany. See also Zhi/Song 2004: 45.
the Bauhaus club is part of a myth-making enterprise. This is not to A visit to Wenyuan Hall is an interesting
experience. One notices something rarely
say that the narratives of Tongji's modernist history are untrue or even seen in photographs or mentioned in
exaggerated, but it is important to see the motivations behind these articles on the building: between upper-
level windows are small, square-shaped
narratives where personal, institutional, and regional identities are at Chinese decorative patterns, details
stake. Feng, Huang, and Tongji are depicted as a singularly Shanghai that are clearly incongruous with the
building's reputation as an exemplary
phenomenon (Ma Qingyun 2004). Whether attributed to the city's Bauhaus design. Cai Yongjie (2005: 75),
pragmatic mercantilism or open-minded pluralism, the acceptance of vice-chairman of the Department of
Architecture at Tongji, stands out as one
modernism could have taken place only in Shanghai. According to Wu of few who see Wenyuan as a far cry
Jiang, Chinese nationalist architecture in the 1930s never took hold in from the embodiment of Gropius' ideals
of integrating form and function. To Cai,
Shanghai because it was incompatible with the economic interest of the Wenyuan Hall is all about form, a view
city's capitalist class.61 Pragmatism is so deeply ingrained in Shanghai that that is perhaps formalist in itself. One
could argue that form is never just about
the city is fundamentally inhospitable to impractical wasteful revivalism. form.

Not even state orthodoxy could persuade Shanghai to embrace the Big
61 In his cost-benefit analysis of
Roof in the 1950s (Luo Xiaowei 1996: 15, 28). modernist architecture, Lai Delin (1995:

By emphasizing the local and institutional character of modernism, 60-62) points out that most modernist
buildings in the Republican period were
historians position Tongji and Shanghai in the mainstream of a worldwide commercial (banks, stores, hotels) or

trend (shijie chaoliu). On more than one occasion, Feng Jizhong (2003a: highly functional (hospitals, residences)
structures.
46-49) reminds his students that Tongji was in the forefront of architectural
and planning development not only in China but also in the world. In
1956, Tongji was the first university in China to establish a separate major
in urban planning despite lack of support, even opposition, from peer
institutions and the Ministry of Education, and was fourth or fifth in the
world to do so. Feng takes great satisfaction that the First World Planning
62 Feng Jizhong (2003a: 46-49) was
Schools Congress was held at Tongji in July 2001 .62
miffed, however, that Tongji's pioneering
Narratives of Tongji and, broadly, Shanghai exceptionalism are not role in China did not receive sufficient

recognition. Tongji began to offer courses

entirely self-congratulatory, for they serve as much-needed affirmations of
in urban planning as early as in 1947
contemporaneity with the West, limited and incomplete as they may be. (Feng Jizhong 2003 b: 90).

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 71

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 Architecture is one field where the Chinese could claim to have a minor

but unbroken modernist tradition. Whereas modernist art and literature

eventually gave ground to socialist realism, modernist architecture

continued to make its presence felt. The materiality of architecture makes
it not only less susceptible to erasure so that visible reminders of China's
modernist past remained but also makes it easier to justify modernism on
economic grounds. Indeed, the campaign to stop the Big Roof on Tongji's
campus was waged precisely in the name of "Anti-wastefulness," taking
advantage of the political movement officially launched in 1955. In hard
economic times, it was possible to convince the authorities of the desirability
63 In other words, "science" (kexuexing) of functionalist architecture shorn of costly ornaments.63
won over "national character"
What is significant is how accounts of Chinese architectural modernism
(minzuxing) (Lai 1995).
shift depending on the authors' vantage points. Although China lacks a
strong modernist tradition, Shanghai can assert a substantial modernist
legacy. China may have been far removed from metropolitan Europe, but
Shanghai was far from being provincial. Whereas Beaux Arts academicism
reigned supreme at most Chinese universities, Tongji kept the flame of
modernism alive. When their colleagues were building elaborate but
safe public projects in the "national style," Tongji professors persisted in
designing unostentatious but sophisticated, highly rational structures. What
is weak and minor at the national level becomes strong and major at the
local and institutional level. At the same time, accounts of a continuous
tradition of modernism provide contrary evidence to those who seek
it - even those from outside Tongji and Shanghai - of China's belatedness.
Stressing their kinship to European modernism (synonymous with "human
progress" or Hegelian enlightenment) enables Tongji and Shanghai to
transcend their temporal and spatial differences from the West. Rather
than isolated from History, Tongji and Shanghai are at one with Europe
(read "the world"). Conversely, if only by association, China is no longer
completely trapped in Europe's past.

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Coda: From Bauhaus to Deshaus

In fall 2002, one of the participants at the Shanghai Biennale was a young,
high-profile local architectural firm with the modest-sounding name Dashe
(Big House). All three partners, Liu Yichun, Zhuang Shen, and Chen Yifeng,
graduated from Tongji University. Quoting from the Han etymological
dictionary Shuowen jiezi, the architects explain the choice of the firm's
name: "Heaven is great. The Earth is great. So are human beings. Therefore,
the character da (big) takes the form of a human. Terms such as daren
(honorable man), dafu (official) are all honorifics."64 Again citing the
64 The architects' mission statement

appears on the firm's website: www.

Shuowen, the architects give the meaning of she as a hostel in a market
deshaus.com.

town. The top of the character she represents the roof of a house, the
middle a signboard, and the bottom the foundation of a building. Thus
the name seems to reflect admirably the architects' desire to be firmly
rooted in native conditions ( bentu tiaojian), yet this determination does not
suggest insularity. On the contrary, when one looks at the firm's Western
name, Atelier Deshaus, one realizes that the architects are shot through
with a multilingual and multicultural consciousness. It is impossible to
tell which takes precedence - Dashe or Deshaus - in the naming process,
whether the architects chose the German-sounding Deshaus for its evocative
association with Bauhaus or its phonetic and semantic similarity to Dashe
or vice versa.

Naturally, the allusiveness of Dashe/Deshaus, its esotericism, is

not intelligible except to a very small multilingual and architecturally
knowledgeable audience. Nor are Dashe/Deshaus mutually illuminating.
Rather than form two sides of the same coin, Chinese humanism (Dashe) and
Western modernism (Bauhaus) hint at two strains of the firm's philosophy.
Liu, Zhuang, and Chen write in their mission statement that much of the
knowledge in the architectural field is foreign in origin (и/а/ lai de), yet
because they have to respond to existing conditions ( xianyou de tiaojian),
their work will be native in character. At the same time, the partners vow
to transcend what is merely local.

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 The architects do not spell out how they will achieve the goal o
being native and supra-native. Part of the difficulty is solved through a
instrumental view of the foreign-derived knowledge (yong) - a soluti
as old as the Self-Strengthening movement of the late nineteenth centur
However, whereas nationalists fought to preserve China's self-sufficiency
and put the West in a "subservient" (i.e., subordinate, useful) positio
internationalists such as Liu, Zhuang, and Chen reverse the hierarchy. Unt
and unless it is affirmed by the world (the West?), China's experience is
limited and partial validity. The opposition between what is local (China)
and what is universal (the world) rears its head again. The difference
that although China is still clearly equated with the particular, the West
no longer unequivocally associated with the universal. Universal seems jus
to mean supranational. Given Dashe's worldliness, one may well expe
65 In 1941, a young architect named the architects to dismiss the dichotomy as specious.65
Huo Ran (Huo Yunpeng) published a
long article, "Guoji jianzhu yu minzu
Indeed, Xiayu (summer rain) Kindergarten in Qingpu near Zhujiajiao
xingshi - lun xin Zhongguo xin jianzhu on the outskirts of Shanghai seems an example of the architects'
di 'xing' de jianli" (International
architecture and national style -
cosmopolitan sophistication. Zhujiajiao is one of the few more or less
establishing the 'typology' of a new intact picturesque canal towns that once dotted the landscape of the lower
architecture in a new China) in the
student journal Xin jianzhu (New
Yangtze valley. Chen Yifeng, the chief designer, resisted the temptation
architecture). Among other things, to build the kindergarten like a faux Suzhou-style garden, yet still wished
Huo insists that what is national is also
international. What is international to acknowledge the local cultural traditions. In the end, the unpromising
must and will inevitably express itself, site led Chen to arrange the classrooms and offices along a shallow curve.
"concretize" (j и xing) in national forms.
See Lai 1995: 71-72. Chen sees the boxlike structures as "containers" (rongqi) safeguarding
the children from the elevated highway and stream surrounding the
kindergarten. Painted in vivid green, yellow, and orange, the "containers"
evoke, according to the architect (Dashe 2005: 101), Matisse's Still Life with
Oranges (fig. 14).
The seemingly self-contained boxes may look foreign and modern in
the traditional setting of Qingpu, yet they serve in typical Chinese fashion
as insulating walls in their relation to the interior courtyard and corridor.
The hard edges of the exterior walls belie the soft edges of the interlocking

74 • The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture

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Figure 14: A photo and model of Xiayu Kindergarten, and Matisse's Still Life with Oranges
(Dashe 2005).

interior spaces. Unlike Republican and early PRC nationalist architecture,

66 The architect's design statement can be
Xiayu kindergarten does not rely on literal quotations. To borrow from
found on the firm's website: http://www.
Feng Jizhong's description of the Tongji proposal for the Great Hall of deshaus.com/research/shuibi/y1 1/y1 1 .
htm. The statement first appeared in
People five decades earlier, Xiayu kindergarten is Chinese in spirit despite
the March 2005 issue of Shidai jianzhu.
its unmistakably modernist appearance.66 Or rather, Chinese and Western, See also Jen Lin-Liu (2005) for a general
description of architectural innovation
tradition and modernity are implicated in each other. Chen's design also
in Qingpu and a brief mention and a
shows that knowledge does not flow exclusively from the West. Traditional photograph of the kindergarten.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 75

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 Chinese garden architecture has just as much to teach as Western academic
training.
Even so, Liu, Zhuang, and Chen feel compelled rhetorically to bifurcate
the world into the universal and the particular along Hegelian lines,
though they assert that national differences are narrowing in the age of
globalization. They, like some of their colleagues, insist that the boundary
between the local and the universal is becoming less and less clear. Local
conditions are not merely local any more, but also global in implication.
Instead of emphasizing national, local particularity, this view chooses to
focus on increasing global homogeneity. Temporal and spatial difference
between China and the West, and the rest of the world, no longer exists.
China is no longer seen as lagging behind the West; nor is China perceived
67 Tian Ye (2004: 78), for instance, cites as being bound by a particular geography.67
ecology as an opportunity for Chinese
architects to be "on the same starting
line" as their Western counterparts. This line of reasoning (some would call it fantasy), however, often
Western architects must confront
comes as an afterthought. Most Chinese architects and artists still adhere
environmental challenges as much as
Chinese architects. to the age-old Hegelian dichotomy. (Re)constructing a Chinese modernist
tradition is, therefore, still a useful way to overcome time and space and
achieve parity with the West. The art historian Li Xianting (2003: 109-1 14)
has written about China's fragmented cultural identity and passive role
in the face of Western cultural hegemony, or what he calls China's being-
prescribed-ness ( bei guidingxing). In an increasingly globalized world
dominated by Western culture, revisiting China's cosmopolitan phase in the
1920s and 1930s helps alleviate anxiety of marginality. No longer having to
turn exclusively to the West, the new generation of "experimental" artists
finds precedents of an indigenous cultural avant-garde. This is one reason
major historians of contemporary Chinese art such as Lang Shaojun (1993;
1994) have written extensively about the Chinese modernist legacy of the
1920s and 1930s. "Experimental" novelists such as Ge Fei (2003) have edited
and drawn on the works of modernist writers like Fei Ming. Reassessing
Chinese modernism of the early twentieth century in its Chinese context

76 • The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture

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makes it possible to sidestep the issue of derivativeness, transforming
past practitioners from imitators into pioneers, and allaying the feeling
of perpetual belatedness vis-à-vis the West. At the same time, China's
modernist tradition becomes a source of historical continuity and a resource
to tap into for contemporary writers, artists, and architects.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 77

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 Glossary

Ba da bu АЛиР
ba guo lian jun ЛИШ¥
bei guiding xing ЙШлЁ'Й
bentu tiaojian
chaoqian ШШ Г
Chen Yifeng R£lIÉill$
dafu
daren
Da Shanghai daxiyuan 3:±.ЩЗЗ£Ш
Dashe
Dong Dayou
dougong Ц-Ш
fazhan shi ying daoli
Fan Wenzhao
Gonggong gongcheng zhuankan
guocui Mffi
guoji jianzhu yu minzu xingshi - lun xin !№И
Zhongguo xin jianzhu di 'xing' de jianli
guojia ШШ
Guomin Dahuitang
he shijie jiegui
Huang Zuoshen ÄitÄ __
Huo Ran (Huo Yunpeng)
Jianzhushi ШШФ
Jianzhu yuekan ШЖп Ť'J
Jin Jingchang Ik&m
Jincheng daxiyuan átíÔLJcÂRrc
juda bu shi weida
juxing Ä Ш
Juelan she Ulít
kexuexing f4^'l4
Li Jinfa
Liang Sicheng Ш&ДК
Lin Huiyin ФШШ
Liu Yichen ШШШ
Lü Yanzhi Sfl
Luo Weidong
Mantetsu
minzu fengge
Minzuzhuyi wenyi yundong xuanyan š
modeng ÄÜ!

78 • The Shifting Narratives of Chinese

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rongqi
Shanghai difangzhi bangongshi
Shanghai shizhongxin quyu jianshe _Ь}$Жф/£чЕ^Ш£
weiyuanhui §§íã#
Shenbao
shidajianzhu
shidai chaoliu Wf^íSJ/Ж
shidai jingshen
shidai zhujue
shijie chaoliu 1i:#iS3žÉ
shikumen
Shishi xinbao
Shuowen jiezi '$кЗсМ¥
Sun Ximing ШШЩ
Tan Yuan ЩЦв
ti yong ftffl
tianxia ^"F
Tongji ЩШ
Tong Jun ШШ
wai lai de
wairen
Wu Jingxiang ЛШ¥
Xi Fuquan ШШШ
Xiayu ЯЩ
xianjinxing Tfciä'tt
xianyou de tiaojian
Xin jianzhu ЩШж
Xinjing (Shinkyo) ffj?4
xumi
Yang Tingbao ШШШ
Zhao Hanguang Ш&Ус
Zhao Shen ШШ
Zhijiang daxue
zhong er gu ФШ"Й"
zhongerxin ФШ§т
zhongguo huati Фй®®
Zhongguo jianzhu ф Цй
Zhongguo benwei wenhua jianshe
xuanyan Шш
Zhujiajiao
Zhuang Shen J±13|
ziyou zhuyi
zou xiang shijie тЁЙ##

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