01 China and the Bauhaus

CHINA AND THE BAUHAUS Encounters and Reactions

Chin-Wei Chang

Early encounters with the Bauhaus and European modernism in China

There are several accounts of Mies van der Rohe’s interactions with the influential Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and the ways in which he sought support for re-opening the Bauhaus in Berlin, after its closure on 11 April 1933. Rosenberg’s simple, yet incisive question: “Why didn’t you change the name for Heavens sake?” (Bergdoll and Dickerman, 2009: 337) still resonates. For Rosenberg, the name “Bauhaus” was more dangerous than the school itself, as a signifier of radical left-wing culture. Alfred Barr, MoMA’s founding director, visited the Bauhaus in 1927, where he met Gropius, along with Feininger, Klee, Moholy Nagy, Schlemmer, and other teachers and students.

Chinese connections and awareness of Bauhaus literature occurred even earlier. Saito Kazo (1887–1955) was a Japanese student who is credited with introducing German Expressionism to Japan; he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, under Bruno Paul in 1912–1914. Before joining China’s National College of Art (now the China Academy of Art), he visited Weimar and talked with Kandinsky and Klee in 1923.

In 1924, Ivan Matsa, a Hungarian art historian, wrote “Modern European Art,” which was translated into Chinese in 1930 (Zhou and Zhou, 2019: 184); it disseminated knowledge about the Bauhaus. In “Producing Craft,” China’s earliest periodical in the field (Beijing 1931), the iconic Dessau building, was first made known to a Chinese public.

There were no Chinese students during the 14-year existence of the Bauhaus at Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. However, Zheng Ke visited in 1929 at the time of the Meyer-curated exhibitions in Basel and Leipzig. He was trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a painter and sculptor, and attended courses at Dessau (Lian 2018: 48).

Pang Xunqin (1906–1985) was an equally significant exponent of modern Chinese design. He studied oil painting at the Academie Julian in Paris and, in 1929 travelled to Berlin for the noted expressionist dancer Mary Wigman’s performances. During his time in Germany, he saw Klee’s paintings at the New Nationalgalerie, and visited modern housing projects by Wagner, Taut, and Scharoun. He returned to China in 1930 and, in 1946 he conceived the idea of establishing a school of applied arts (Pang, 2005: 111–117)—the idea became a reality in 1956 in the Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing, which drew on teachers from the National Hangzhou School of Art.

The 1934 silent film “New Women”, Directed by Cai Chusheng and filmed on location in Shanghai, explored the role of educated, modern young women in 1940’s Chinese society and was considered to be deeply controversial due to its explicit exploration of female professional and sexual autonomy. Other progressive films of that decade featured modernist interiors as well as material emblems of modernity—cars, electric lights and fans, radios and fashion. The department stores Xinxin and Wingin, with elevators, central heating, and air conditioning, were conspicuous examples of technological advancement. Patrons could hire first-generation Chinese architects, trained overseas, like Dong Dayou to design “International style” houses influenced by Le Corbusier as well as German designers— initially, the impact of modernism was experienced through design and, only later on the full scale of architecture.

Chinese architect-planners—discourse formation and pedagogies

Huang Zuoshen attended the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1933 to 1938, and then followed Gropius to the United States (US), becoming his first Chinese disciple. Before his role, as Harvard University’s Professor of Architecture (1937–1952), for which post candidates included Mies from Berlin and J.J.P. Oud from Rotterdam were considered; Gropius’s transitional career in the United Kingdom (UK) is occasionally overlooked, as is Huang’s. On 18 October 1934, Gropius arrived in London and lived there until he moved on to America. For those three years, Gropius lived at the Lawn Road Flats (later known as the Isokon Building) designed by Wells Coates: a British icon of modern architecture. Lawn Road also served as a residence for Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer throughout their brief stay in London. Given that the émigrés were only allowed to practise in partnership with an established UK architect, Gropius joined young Maxwell Fry in London. Fry brought the Bauhaus founding director’s ascetic utopianism down to earth, contributing characteristics that were distinctively English; the “London Bauhaus” could be distinguished, at a glance, from Gropius’s harsher, stripped-down functionalist aesthetics in Germany.

Although evidence suggests that AA talks by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier later in the fifties were very popular, Gropius’s presence was relatively low profile during his stay in the UK between 1934 and 1937. Fry and other active members of the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group, like Berthold Lubetkin and F.R.S. Yorke, were conspicuously active in the AA circle, whose base at Bedford Square served as their regular meeting venue. Huang experienced this milieu of emigre Bauhäuslers, and was present at exhibitions arranged and attended by the avant garde community.

In January 1938, MARS’s modern architecture exhibition took place at London’s New Burlington Galleries. Huang’s classmate and close friend A.J. Brandt went to the event and published a provocative review in Architectural Association Journal. Huang would have been aware of that article, given the esprit de corps promoted by the recently adopted Unit System (in lieu of the Year System). And he would have been familiar with the AA students’ publication Focus. In four issues published between 1938 and 1939, Huang would have been able to read articles, including Moholy-Nagy’s “Education and the Bauhaus” as well as Sigfried Giedion’s “The Bauhaus, 1919–28”—he was also in face-to-face contact with Corbusier in Paris at about the same time.

His direct exposure to these influential European designers involved refusing a sought after internship offered by Le Corbusier (Hsiao and White, 2015: 185). Huang followed Gropius to the US and attended his Master Class at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) in the academic years 1938–1940. He was the first Chinese architect, before I.M. Pei, who

trained at the legendary “Harvard Bauhaus.” One year after his graduation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1942, Huang returned to China and was invited to set up an architectural engineering department at St. John’s University (a predecessor of today’s Architecture and Urban Planning School at Tongji University), one of the earliest missionary programmes in cosmopolitan Shanghai.

In terms of nationality and diversity, Huang’s faculty recruitment was not unlike that of the German “Bauhaus.” In addition to his AA fraternity, Richard Paulick was recommended by Gropius as the head of the Engineering College and part of the Architects Collaborative (TAC)’s far-eastern deployment (Chang, 2019: 97) as a teacher of both interior design and urban planning. Significantly, the Hungarian H.J. Hajek oversaw history courses, to replicate the ethos of students becoming teachers, in keeping with the Bauhaus tradition, in the immediate post-war years.

A decade of Bauhaus-inspired endeavours at SJU (1942–1952), culminated in Huang’s Vorkurs -modelled preliminary course “Pattern and Texture,” in which students had to make materials perform intrinsic qualities through hands-on practice. That was in contrast to the conventional protocols of most of China’s architectural training, which remained at the behest of Beaux-Arts-centric pedagogy. Huang’s anti-formalist approach was functionalist-oriented because mechanical engineers steered his design courses, as well as those of his peers from the most progressive UK and/or US institutions, who served as studio critics. For example, Wang Dahong, who studied at the University of Cambridge before knowing Huang at GSD (Figure 11.1).

When it comes to realism and social relevance, however, Huang’s experimental emphasis was directed elsewhere. For example, his pioneering class of architectural criticism in China: the course designated Architectural Engineering 5 (A.E. 5) on Theory of Architecture.

Figure 11.1 Studio critics (from left to right): A.J. Brandt, Zhong Yaohua, Zhen Guanxuan, Huang (chair), and Wang Dahong (far right) at SJU, circa 1948 (Courtesy of Richard Paulick Estate, Gabriele Paulick Private Archive, Berlin).

As is clearly demonstrated by his reading list on the syllabus, in addition to Corbusier and Giedion’s long-lasting “bibles” Toward an Architecture (1927, English version) and Space, Time and Architecture (1941), the radical emphasis added via MARS members came to the forefront: Yorke’s A Key to Modern Architecture (1939) and Fry’s Architecture for Children (1944), along with the selected writings of Wright, whose Taliesin Fellowship maintained British-style apprenticeships not unlike Chinese builders and trainees.

Had it not been for his deep-seated, yet far-reaching youthful Bauhaus experience before Pax Americana and US Consumerism, Huang would have been less influenced by the late Victorian architect Sir Thomas Jackson—“Architecture does not consist in beautifying buildings; on the contrary it should consist in building beautifully”—from his 1948 speech delivered at the British Consulate-General in Shanghai (Huang, 1948). Huang’s Bauhaus approach therefore was not solely rooted in the masters of European modernism; instead, it was more influenced by a coalescence of “modernisms” traversing the Atlantic, London Bauhaus combined with Harvard Bauhaus, which enabled him to offer a more varied and comprehensive ideology and shed new light on China’s architectural education, then still held in the sway of the École model.

Looked at from this perspective, the role of Huang invites attention to another pioneer: Liang Sicheng, his counterpart in North China during the 1940s. Throughout the 1920s, there were numerous French influences at architecture schools in the US. In addition to Jean-Jacques Haffner, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1919, who was replaced by Gropius at Harvard, there were Eugene Letang at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Jean Labatut at Princeton University, and Liang’s alma mater was no exception: Paul Cret made the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) the most distinguished Beaux-Arts-design-based programme on the East Coast (Atkin, 2011: 60).

The first architectural engineering department that Liang created in China was at Dongbei (Northeast) University in Shenyang in 1928, which imitated the Parisian system, that honed students’ talent in compositional drawing. The department, to Liang’s dismay, existed for only three years due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that began on the 18th September, 1931 However, Liang was not alone in teaching on that shortly lived programme, where faculty was joined by colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, including his wife, Lin Huiyin, as well as Chen Zhi and Tong Jun who stayed when the Liangs moved to Beijing, in 1931, to work at the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture (SRCA) for the next 15 years, including a nine-year-long exile in barren Southwest China, until the surrender of Japan in August 1945.

Liang’s second department of architectural engineering, at his alma mater Tsinghua University in Beijing, was influenced by a second visit to the US between 1946 and 1947. Most current accounts of that experience of mid-century American modernism and its appropriateness to China’s post-war reconstruction are condensed into a few photographs in which Liang poses with significant exponents of modernist design. Doing away with overblown monumentality and anachronistic styles, as a Board of Design member for the building of United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in New York City, Liang participated in civic-minded discussions of its architectural design with Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer (Chang, 2017: 68).

These images—albeit meaningful—overshadow many other significant issues arising during his concurrent visiting professorship in Chinese art and architecture at Yale University. First and foremost, his teaching assistant in New Haven was a GSD alumnus, Wu Kinglui, who could contribute an understanding of what was currently taught at two leading American architectural schools. In this way, not only did Wu provide Liang with information relating to the curriculum at Yale and Harvard, but he also helped purchase

state-of-the-art publications, including professional journals such as Architectural Forum , Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, and Pencil Points

As Dean Joseph Hudnut’s philosophy at Harvard brought different majors together under one agenda, a ground-breaking notion even before the advent of Gropius, to organise GSD, Liang came up with idea that his architecture “department” should be upgraded to a “college” in order to accommodate burgeoning professions concerned with the “physical environment,” a key concept that he learned at the 1947 convocation Planning Man’s Phy sical Environment (PMPE) at Princeton University on its 200th anniversary. Even though the bicentennial event was attended by an all-star, all-white, and (virtually) all-male cast of Western modernism, Liang—the only Chinese delegate—was able to meet with the gurus, including Hudnut, Gropius, Giedion, Philip Johnson, Alvar Aalto, György Kepes, Serge Chermayeff, William Wurster, Richard Neutra, and Lloyd Wright (Figure 11.2).

Liang’s interests comprised industrial art, horticultural and landscape design and urban planning. He devised a “Draft Plan of Academic Structure and Programme in the Department of Yingjian at Tsinghua University” (Liang, 1949). After returning from the US, he subdivided “architecture” into architectural design and architectural engineering. Each required that students should undertake specific courses from five areas of study, systematically crafted by Liang. In that framework, architectural design and urban planning figured as the most important part of “體形環境 (ti sing huan jing )”—to borrow his own Chinese translation of Princeton’s “physical environment (substance-form environment). Students were required to take courses in Cultural and Social Background. It was in this area of study that Liang taught both Euro-American and Chinese histories of painting, sculpture, and architecture whilst trying to reconcile Beaux-Arts methods with the precepts of modernism.

Shanghai established its official urban planning committee in 1946, and more than half its members were drawn from the faculty at SJU, including Huang himself and studio critics: Luke Him Sau, Chen Zhanxing, Zhen Guanxuan, and Wang Dahong. They worked together with students, making their dedicated contribution to citizens’ well-being.

Figure 11.2 The PMPE Conference Group outside the Princeton Inn (Liang at far left of the second row) (Courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University).

When the scheme was completed, by 1948, they teamed up as one of the first post-war “as sociated architects” Wu Lian (Five United) which bore testimony to the re-unification of British-trained architects in China (Denison, 2015: 219–220).

The most professional planner among SJU studio critics, Chen (graduated from that field at the University of Liverpool and worked with Sir Patrick Abercrombie at University College London), went northbound in Beijing in late 1949 to assist Liang in planning the municipal capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and they painstakingly produced a “Proposal on the Location of the Central Administration District of the Central People’s Government”—known as Liang-Chen Proposal—in the February of the following year. In spite of its eventual abeyance due to the stubborn officialdom of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and its ultimate failure as a result of politics duress aligned with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Zhu, 2014: 287–293), the cause célèbre is still debated to this day.

Although they are rooted in different intellectual origins—MARS’s London master plan for Huang—CIAM’s Athens Charter for Liang proved inspirational at a time of postwar Nationalist reconstruction. Both of them, individually and together, equipped their fol lowers with the most progressive planning schemes of that time: satellite towns, neighbourhood units, and organic decentralisation were among the key issues they addressed. Acting as “architect-planners” alongside other contemporaries, affiliated to the Bauhaus or not, they sustained the disappointment that all their endeavours were turned down when Mao Zedong’s CCP favoured Soviet experts during the decades that followed his victory in the Civil War.

Unfollow Gropius? The Bauhaus revisited or modernism revised?

When Chinese artists first encountered Western modernity through travelling and living abroad in 1920s–1930s, the technological circumstance in the motherland disabled their potential on their return: Zheng could only implement his progressive will in Hong Kong (HK) and Singapore, where he was accredited as a pioneer who broadened their horizon in terms of modern design. When Chinese architects studied with Bauhäuslers and sought to bring the aesthetic to bear in a Chinese context, the turbulence of political and social upheaval frustrated their initiatives. Huang’s partners of Wu Lian could only seek fulfilment elsewhere, for example, after 1949: AA alumnus Luke in HK became renowned for residential apartments. Another Gropius’s GSD Protégé, was Wang Dahong in Taiwan, which, with HK was known as “Free China” during the Cold War), his modernist Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall was built in 1965 and remains one of Taipei City’s sightseeing landmarks in the 21st century.

After the completion of his designed house in “Formosa” (the Portuguese name of Taiwan, dating back to the 16th century) in 1953, Wang wrote to Gropius (Figures 11.3–11.5), “I hope, that I have succeeded in making the building look Chinese!” (Wang, 1961). This is critical in relation to questioning the universality of the notion “International Style” leading to the tentative conclusion that “Bauhaus” is better understood as a method rather than a definitive outcome. The interpretative use of modernist training emphasises the extent to which the Bauhaus was an exceptional result of an extraordinary time—the collapse of the German Empire and the dramatic birth of a new republic. Specifically, it was a European project, intended to solve the local, cultural problems regarding “good design” in an industrial economy.

“All history,” opined Benedetto Croce in 1915, “is contemporary history,” by which he means that all serious study of the past is informed by the problems and needs of the writer’s own time, and that the more conscious historians are of their contemporary motives,

the more accurate their investigations of the past will be. Why do most Bauhaus centenary celebrations take place at architecture, rather than at art schools? Vorkurs had never been situated exclusively for the training of an architect, let alone of an urban planner. The success of the American Bauhaus—to be more specific, Harvard Bauhaus—cast a shadow on the fact that, on the one hand, it was Hudnut, not Gropius, who was the head of GSD; and

Figures 11.3 Three photographs of Wang’s House in Taipei sent to Gropius along with his letter on 26 August 1961 (MS Ger 208, Box 35: 1691. Cou rtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University).

(MS

that, on the other, it was during the leadership of Meyer (the lesser known Bauhaus director) in Dessau that building education was made a school priority and less than a year before Gropius’s departure for private practice in Berlin, the department of architecture was finally est ablished in the April of 1927.

Might one venture the thesis that instead of asking what all kinds of modernist architects, designers, or artists in China owe to the Bauhaus, it makes more sense to conceive the

Figures 11.4 Three photographs of Wang’s House in Taipei sent to Gropius along with his letter on 26 August 1961

Ger 208, Box 35: 1691. Cou rtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Bauhaus as a collection of attitudes, something beyond names and objects that have been acquired, appropriated, or adopted—in each case in a particular way, and under specific circumstances.. What a contemporary discipline needs is to unfollow Gropius as well as to foster interest in the processes of reception, translation, and transformation and their impact on people and the vernacular landscape.

Did Gropius reply to Wang’s letter, mentioned above, concerned with Chinese-ness?

There was no direct response; yet, a consequential one would only become apparent in 1968 when Wang had moved to another residence named Rainbow House and had already accomplished his magnum opus in Taiwan, where his buildings addressed not only his contemporaries, but also folklore in terms of regional materials and tectonic constructions. That tantalising communication occurred one year before the master’s death: Gropius gifted Wang with “A Fitting Poem as a Memento to an Architect” (Gropius, 1968) written by Greek diplomat and poet George Seferis (Figure 11.6):

All I want is to speak simply: for this grace I pray

For we have loaded even the song with so many kinds of music

That gradually it sinks. And our art we so decorated Its face is eaten away.

And it is time now for us to say the few words we have to say

Because tomorrow our soul sets sail.

Figures 11.5 Three photographs of Wang’s House in Taipei sent to Gropius along with his letter on 26 August 1961

(MS Ger 208, Box 35: 1691. Cou rtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University).

“Like a bomb,” according to Huang’s and Wang’s GSD classmate Bruno Zevi regarding the chairmanship of Gropius appointed at Harvard in 1937, “placed in the foundations of academic training”: within a few years, “Chicago called Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe; Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited Alvar Aalto; and Yale, Berkeley, and Oregon reorganised their faculties” (Zevi, 1959: 691). However, in Gropius’s own words: “I

Figure 11.6 A handwriting “calligraphy” poem enclosed within the letter from Gropius to Wang on 14 August 1968 (MS Ger 208, Box 35: 1691. Cou rtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University).

hope my appointment will be a further proof of the American ability to reconcile and amalgamate the most diverse types of people to create a new form of life of typically American stamp” (Gropius, 1937: 9).

“At times in the 1930s and ‘40s,” recalled Wilma Fairbank, “I heard [Liang] Sicheng express a wistful regret that he had just missed this induction into the contemporary movements of architecture” (Fairbank, 1994: 26). Nevertheless, it was the middle ground between BeauxArts, Modernism, and Chinese-ness that, on the one hand, enabled Liang to lead a unique enterprise in recovering the history of Chinese architecture, and, on the other, prompted Paul Cret to eloquently contend: “Being modern is quite another thing from being a modernist, and is not the privilege of a clan [insinuating American/Harvard Bau haus]. Architectural progress is, and always has been, the work of all men of good will” (Cret, 1934: 116).

The same process was repeated in China. Not only did Huang, after an oration entitled “Chinese Architecture” in an address to the British Council of Shanghai in 1948, recruit Chen Congzhou to teach the history of Chinese architecture at a Westernised SJU, but also Liang, on coming back from his multiple spells in Midwestern America, where his early attempts to promote a domestic modern architecture were often overshadowed by the new incarnation of the Bauhaus—sent Wu Liangyong (his first teaching colleague at Tsinghua) to Cranbrook Academy of Art to study architecture and urban design with Eliel Saarinen in the same year. This chapter aims to cast new light on the tremendous impact of the Bauhaus, which has often obscured attempts made by “other” educators to promote a modern Chinese architecture from within. It suggests how the prestige of that institution, first at the heart of European modernism, then as a driving force for disseminating its principles on an international scale, created opportunities and obstacles for architects seeking to implement a style that was relevant to their own national contexts. Some people are always there, says Huang at SJU as well as Liang at Tsinghua; they never began at zero.

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