Accidental Affinities: American Beaux-Arts in Twentieth-Century Chinese Architectural Education and Practice

Abstract

This essay looks at the adoption of American Beaux-Arts in China. China's first architecture school was established in the 1920s in Nanjing. The Nanjing School enjoyed a prosperous time in the 1940s when a group of young architects joined the faculty. Most of them had been trained in the 1920s at the University of Pennsylvania under Paul Philippe Cret. The most prominent among them was Yang Tingbao, a star pupil of Cret's. Yang became one of the most influential architects and educators in twentieth-century China, and he remained the spiritual leader of the Nanjing School until his death in 1982. The early history of Chinese architectural education and of Yang's practice shows accidental affinities that have marked the encounters between two cultural frames. Based on a selected "thick description" of Yang's teaching and architectural works between the 1920s and 1980s, this article suggests that the Beaux-Arts method, from its early contacts to its later transformations, has corresponded to Chinese artisan traditions in a series of interesting areas. They include the process of cultivation in producing and appreciating a craft, axial planning and space perception, and close collaboration between architects and builders. Instead of underlining cultural difference, I attempt to shed some light on the entangled nuances between the universal Beaux-Arts method and the traditions of one of its adopted localities, China.