Chinese Architecture and The Beaux-Arts

Chinese Architecture and The Beaux-Arts

Chinese Architecture and The Beaux-Arts

This book is the story of the convergence of two major architectural systems:
Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École
des Beaux-Arts. Unpredictably in the early twentieth century, the two systems
coalesced in the United States as approximately fifty young Chinese students
received scholarships to be trained as architects in U.S. universities, many of which
had adopted design teaching methodologies derived from the École in Paris.
In
the 1920s and 1930s, when the Chinese graduates of these architectural programs
returned to China and began to practice architecture and to establish China’s first
architectural schools, they transferred a version of what they had learned in the
United States to Chinese situations. This transfer, a complex series of design-related
transplantations, had major implications for China, which, between 1911—the year
in which the last Chinese dynasty, Qing (1644–1911), fell—and 1949—the year
the People’s Republic was founded—was simultaneously experiencing cataclysmic
social, economic, and political changes. In the 1950s China experienced a radically
different wave of influence branded with the imprint of the École when several
architectural and engineering advisors from the Soviet Union, themselves distant
products of Beaux-Arts methods via the Palace School of Architecture, Stalin, and
Khrushchev, helped their Chinese comrades in the guise of socialist progress.
The
architectural and other implications of these events are still felt today.

Jeffrey.W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt and Tony Atkin