A Ground between Beaux-Arts, Modernism, and Chineseness: Tracing Modernities in China's Architectural Education and Practice, 1919-1949

Architecture, as a body of knowledge embodied in education and profession, is a transplanted discipline in China, a country possessed millennia of building history without so-called architects until the turn of last century. It was during the first four decades of the twentieth century that the Chinese inaugurated formal training and associated partnerships with 'home-grown' architects, whose first generation consisted of young professionals returned to their motherland from formal training in foreign institutions. Inevitably, multiple approaches and distinctive trajectories were introduced in accordance with educators' overseas backgrounds, meaning that Euro-American and Japanese paradigms or methods influenced China's architectural pedagogy. This essay focuses on a nebulous middle ground amid Beaux-Arts, Modernism and 'Chineseness' between 1919 and 1949. It was during this seminal epoch that architectural teaching became established in China. Taken together, this work aims at exploring the intellectual and pedagogic intersections through a trilogy of themes: practice, pedagogy, and discourse. In addition to constructing an overview of the territory underpinned by these three domains, the essay concentrates primarily on the pedagogical and institutional context that collectively characterised China's architectural heterogeneity before 1949.