A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture - Past, Present, Future

A PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE
ARCHITECTURE
A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future examines the impact of

Chinese philosophy on China’s historic structures, as well as on modern Chinese
urban aesthetics and architectural forms. For architecture in China moving forward,
author David Wang posits a theory, the New Virtualism, which links current trends
in computational design with long-standing Chinese philosophical themes. The
book also assesses twentieth-century Chinese architecture through the lenses of
positivism, consciousness (phenomenology), and linguistics (structuralism and
poststructuralism). Illustrated with over 70 black-and-white images, this book
establishes philosophical baselines for assessing architectural developments in China,
past, present, and future.
David Wang is Professor of Architecture in the School of Design and Construction,

Washington State University. He holds BA and MArch degrees from the University
of Pennsylvania, and the MS Arch and PhD from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Wang has lectured widely on design research methods in China and the
Scandinavian countries. This current book comes out of many years of teaching a
comparative course in European and Chinese philosophies and their impact on
architecture and material culture.
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A PHILOSOPHY
OF CHINESE
ARCHITECTURE
Past, Present, Future
David Wang
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of David Wang to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Wang, David, 1954- author.
Title: A philosophy of Chinese architecture : past, present, future / David Wang.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020485| ISBN 9781138884601 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138884618 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315715995 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--Philosophy. | Architecture, Chinese. |
Architecture--China.
Classification: LCC NA2500 .W36 2017 | DDC 720.1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020485
ISBN: 978-1-138-88460-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-88461-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71599-5 (ebk)
Acquisition Editor: Wendy Fuller

Editorial Assistant: Grace Harrison
Production Editor: Lisa Sharp
Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
To my father, and the memory of my mother
CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
PART I
Past 11
1 Architecture and Experience in the Chinese Correlative

View 13
2 Homes for Plato and Confucius 37
3 An Aesthetics of Chinese Built Environments 61
PART II
Present 83
4 The Positivist Turn: The Loss of Apperception in Present-day

Chinese Architecture 85
5 Chinese Architecture in an Age of Poststructuralism 110

viii Contents
PART III
Future 139
6 A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture 141
7 Towards an Architecture of the New Virtualism 168
Appendix: Chinese Technical Terms 195
Bibliography 198
Credits 208
Index 210
FIGURES
I.1 “Consulate-style” housing under construction, Ningbo 6

1.1 Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, Qian Xuan (1235–1305 CE) 13
1.2 Nude and Artist (1525), by Albrecht Dürer 14
1.3a and b Two heuristic Eye/I diagrams 15
1.4 A feng shui bar in a residence, Hangzhou 20
1.5a The square and curve captures Confucian rectitude (square)
overlapped by Daoist spontaneity (curve) 25
1.5b A courtyard in the Yu4 Yuan2, Shanghai 25
1.6 An in-between urban space in Kunming 28
1.7 A diagram of the sequential steps required to order a state,
prescribed in The Great Learning 30
1.8a Ceremonial gate in front of a modern bank building along
Chang’an Avenue, Beijing 31
1.8b A gate to a precinct for art and culture in Shenzhen 31
1.9 An arterial road in Wuhan (Louyu Road) 34
2.1 A “folie” at the Parc de la Villette, Paris, by Bernard Tschumi 40
2.2a Interior of St. Denis Cathedral, Paris 45
2.2b St. Teresa in Ecstasy, 1650, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in the
Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome 45
2.3 S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 1634, by Francesco Borromini,
Rome 46
2.4 Dou gong brackets in the Forbidden City, Beijing 53
2.5 Structures in the courtyard of the Hall of the Cultivation of
Character, Forbidden City, Beijing 54
2.6 Plan of the Forbidden City 56
2.7 The Hall of Supreme Harmony 57
3.1 A new mansion in southern Taiwan 62
x Figures
3.2 Design proposal for Gangxia Village, Shenzhen, by Urbanus

Architects 63
3.3 A very typical scene of cluttered street life in urban Wuhan 64
3.4 A “chicken store” in Nanjing 72
3.5 A courtyard space in the Ju’er Hutong complex, Beijing 73
3.6 Latticework and layers of inside–inside to inside–outside space
in The Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou 77
3.7 Elephant Rock, Guilin, Guangxi Province 78
4.1 National Central Museum, Nanjing 87
4.2 A “Western-style” pavilion in ruins in the old Summer Palace
northwest of the Forbidden City, Beijing 89
4.3 A diagram of Chinese modernity, derivable from the ti-yung
dialectic 92
4.4a Sassoon Building (now Peace Hotel), Shanghai. Palmer and
Turner Architects, 1929 95
4.4b Peking Union Medical College as it is today, Beijing. Designed
by Harry Hussey in 1921 95
4.5 China Art Museum (China Pavilion, 2010), Shanghai 100
4.6 The Great Hall of the People, Beijing 102
4.7 Beijing Railway Station 104
4.8 The Global Center, Chengdu 105
4.9 A neighborhood in Orange County, Beijing 106
5.1a Customs House, Hankou, Wuhan 112
5.1b St. Joseph’s Church, 1876, built in the British Concession in
Hankow (Hankou), now part of Wuhan 113
5.2 René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933 115
5.3a Architectural components in Cyclopædia, an Universal Dictionary
of Arts and Sciences. James and John Knapton, vol. 1, 1728 118
5.3b Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier 118
5.4a Wuhan University Library, 1920, F.H. Kales 120
5.4b Wuhan University Library, concrete dou gong corner assembly 120
5.5 Christian Salvation Hall, Hankou, 1931 121
5.6 Event center designed as a medieval cathedral, Wuhan 122
5.7 Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Nanjing 127
5.8 Timeline of modern events and important architectural benchmarks 129
5.9 Shanghai Pudong viewed from the Bund in 2015 130
5.10 High-rise residential towers under construction in Hankou, Wuhan 131
6.1a Hui4, meaning assembly or gathering 144
6.1b A pavilion in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou 144
6.2a Guest house at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, by Wang Shu 146
6.2b Reclaimed tile wall at Ningbo Museum in Ningbo, by Wang Shu 146
6.3a Detail of a windowsill in a new building, Xi’an 148
6.3b Risers of uneven heights in a building in Wuhan 148
6.4a Dinosaur Egg Museum, Hubei Province, by Li Baofeng 155
Figures xi
6.4b Dinosaur Egg Museum wall detail 155

6.5 Sun Zhuo at an interior partition she designed for the Goethe
Institute, 798 Art Precinct, Beijing 157
6.6 Eco-farm on Yang Cheng Lake, Kunshan (near Suzhou) by
Dong Gong and Vector Architects 158
6.7 Entrance atrium of office building on Chang’an Avenue, Beijing 160
6.8 Linked Hybrid housing community in Beijing, by Steven Holl 161
6.9 CCTV Tower under construction in Beijing in 2005, by Rem
Koolhaas and OMA 164
7.1 Floating Island over WTC site, New York, 2001 (Ma Yansong,
masters thesis project) 170
7.2 Social media activity uniting Shenzhen and Hong Kong as one
cyber-connected entity 172
7.3a Computer map of the level of cellphone usage at Rome’s Termini
train station on a given day 176
7.3b The “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, Beijing, by Herzog and
de Meuron, 2003 176
7.4 Liantang–Heung Yuen Wai Boundary Terminal between Hong
Kong SAR and Shenzhen 179
7.5 Daoist Museum (model), Sichuan Province. Studio Pei Zhu,
Beijing 180
7.6a Solitary Temple Amidst Bright Peaks. Landscape painting by
Li Cheng (919–967 CE) 184
7.6b Ma Yansong’s WTC project viewed from ground level 185
7.7 Pudong housing, Shanghai, seen from the World Financial Center 186
7.8 Shenzhen Bo’an Airport Terminal, by Studio Fuksas 188
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Washington State University for granting me the professional leave

and financial resources to write this book. Thanks also to all my colleagues at the
School of Design and Construction for making our academic home in the Palouse
such a great place to teach, learn, write, and build together. Special thanks to Phil
Gruen, Greg Kessler, Taiji Miyasaka, Carrie Vielle, and Saleh Kalantari. I am also
grateful to these staff who facilitated this project: Jaime Rice, Cheryl Scott,
Kimberly Clanton, and Darcie Young.
Academic colleagues in China helped in various ways, from hosting me, to
arranging invited lectures, to taking me to all sorts of sites, to sharing examples of
their work, to granting me hours of interviews: Liu Jiaping, Yang Liu, Wang
Shusheng, Zhang Qun, Lei Zheng Dong, Cheng Hui, Li En, Li Baofeng, Lu Xiaohu
(and his assistants Shyeah and Aris), Tan Gangyi, Mengyuan Xu, and Mary Polites.
Also thanks to these practitioners and their associates: Sun Zhuo, Yung Ho Chang,
Dang Qun, Bao Pao, Tammy Xie, Dong Gong, Chen Liu, Zhu Pei, Fiona Hua,
Silas Chow, Li Hu, Cheng Chen, Hui Wang, Yan Meng, Jing Li, Yun and Sophie
(Urbanus), Tao Huang, and Elaine Tsui.
Students at WSU also helped: Shannon Coughlin on market research for the
book proposal; XiXi He on translation input; Qiongyan Gao on ordering books
from China, and also contributing an image in Chapter 1; Richard Tung on graphics;
Ivan Schulz by asking me to be his advisor on his Honors research paper on Ma
Yansong; and Holly Sowles by being my Teaching Assistant through much of the
period this book was written.
Thanks to the doctoral students at the Huazhong University of Science and
Technology in Wuhan. Many of their research topics gave me insight into current
issues for architecture and urban design in China. Special thanks to: Ghassan Hassan,
Gelareh Sadeghi, Zeyang Yu, Qian Ji, Lu Yang, Hu Ci, and Gan Wei.
Acknowledgments xiii
I also want to thank Professors Xiao Hu, Delin Lai, Tom Verebes, and Andres
Sevtsuk for sharing their research, images, and correspondence in this project.
My editors at Routledge were excellent: Wendy Fuller and Grace Harrison.
I look forward to working with them again.
Finally, thanks to my wife and best friend, Valerie. I couldn’t do any of this
without you.
INTRODUCTION
The sheer volume and speed of building construction in China today is

unprecedented in human history. That old cliché truly applies: one has to see it
to believe it. So it is not surprising that the number of publications on Chinese
architecture has increased in recent years, and the following pages will interact with
this material. But this book approaches architecture in China in a way that, as far
as I know, has not yet been taken in this literature, at least not to the length
attempted here. I aim to ask: “What is Chinese architecture?” through the lens of
Chinese philosophy. Readers may balk at even asking this question, because
globalization and information technology have rendered “national distinctiveness”
something of a dated concern. But let me explain why this is necessary.
Prior to 1840, there was no Chinese architecture. By this I mean architecture did
not exist in China as a self-contained, philosophically focused object of
contemplation. This is in contrast to the Greco-European West, at least since
Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture dating from the first century BCE. A building
must be firmitas, utilitas, venustas, wrote Vitruvius.1 Ever since this utterance there
exists a continuous line of opining on the urgent question of what buildings (of
all things) should look like. Let’s assign a general term for this body of literature:
architectural theory. There is no comparable line of theorizing in Chinese ideas.
This is one reason why our question is relevant. This is one reason why our question
is philosophical. Why wasn’t there such a line of theorizing for something as
culturally serious as (we would think) architecture? What kind of culture was this
that didn’t obsessively theorize about what buildings should look like? Chapters 1
and 2 answer this question. It is pertinent to the present situation because as architects
in China grapple with what contemporary Chinese architecture ought to be, they
are confronted with generating architectural theory in a philosophical tradition that
does not offer a lineage of such ideas to draw from. All of it is de novo; and this
novelty shows up in different ways in architecture in China today. This leads to
the second reason why our question is needed.
2 Introduction
Since 1840, “What is Chinese architecture?” remains contested ground. The year
1840 marks the First Opium War (it actually began in 1839), which is widely
regarded as the starting point for China’s entrance into the way of being called
modernity. For China, modernity came in the form of British gunboats and firearms
when that European nation tried to balance trade with China by making opium
addicts out of millions of Chinese citizens. But of course this is only part of the
story. The European nations also brought railroads, gas lighting, piped water, and
entire planned urban sectors in “treaty ports” such as Shanghai; in short, they brought
all of the powers of the Industrial Revolution. It completely discombobulated what
the sinologist A.C. Graham called the Chinese correlative worldview.2 Even as the
“foreign devils” were abhorred, their technology was seen as vital for leading China
out of the wilderness after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. A new
generation of intellectuals embraced “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” while
rejecting the normative prescriptions of the correlative view that had animated
Chinese society for millennia. Chapter 1 explains the correlative view; Chapters
4 and 5 address its rupture. Suffice it here to say that it was in the decades in which
this rupture took place that architecture as a construct—not to mention architect as
a construct—first emerged on the Chinese horizon of ideas. In this regard Liang
Sicheng (1901–1972) is hailed to this day as “the father of Chinese architecture.”3
He narrated the first history of Chinese architecture based on empirical
measurements. He innovated a Chinese architectural “order.” He sought to
develop a Chinese national architectural style. But Liang Sicheng was a product
of my own architectural alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where he
studied under the renowned Beaux-Arts theoretician, Paul Philippe Cret. When
he returned to China in 1927 after his education, he brought back with him Western
architectural predilections. So with Liang Sicheng, something that didn’t even exist
as a theoretical construct was not only assigned a history; it was assigned an order.
And now that we are a modern Chinese state, we also need to theorize an
architectural style that befits the new nation. The point is that the very beginning
of architecture as a theoretical object of concern in China was informed by
European ideals. Hence what is Chinese about Chinese architecture remains elusive.
One might still object that I am being picayune, perhaps provincial. Since
European ideas kick-started awareness of architecture in China, we should just accept
it as a fact of history, and move on. But this posture is not sufficient, for a variety
of important reasons. First, the past is always present in a culture’s ways of being.
In China’s case this is not only true of its urban fabrics; it is also true of the ways
of making architecture fit those fabrics (or not). It is therefore also true of the way
present environmental aesthetics in China ought to be read and experienced. I
address this in Chapter 3, where I propound an aesthetics of current Chinese urban
environments derived from Chinese philosophy.
Second, as alluded to earlier, architects in China today are in the position of
forging a path ahead while also looking for their roots. For example, Yan Meng,
a partner at Urbanus Architects in Shenzhen and Beijing, feels the conflict between
a profound break with the past not only because of the (now distant) early
Introduction 3
twentieth-century rejection of Confucian values, but also because of the more recent
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which forced an entire new generation of
intellectuals to look for theoretical roots other than China’s own. But for Yan Meng,
“What is Chinese architecture?” is a question confronted by every thoughtful
architect in China today.4 Yung Ho Chang, former dean of architecture at MIT
and head of FCJZ Architects in Beijing, concurs. While architects in China have
no single answer to the question of what Chinese architecture is, “I am one of
them asking this question,”5 says Chang, who has been a role model of thoughtful
practice for many younger Chinese architects. So for Meng and Chang, and others
I will mention, it seems that a bridge from the past to the future is needed.
Third, something of a revival of the old ways is taking place in China. In The
Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China, Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval
not only document widespread embrace of Confucianism among both everyday
citizens as well as government officials, but also, more importantly, suggest that ties
to ancient Confucian principles never went away even after rejection of past
teachings in the early years after 1911.6 Even as this book is being written, the current
leader of China, Xi Jinping, has softened Communist ideology and promoted
schooling in Confucianism for China’s highest ministers. Jeremy Page writes this for
the Wall Street Journal: “In the last year, the party has publicly ordered its officials
nationwide to attend lectures on Confucius and other classical Chinese thinkers, while
tightening restrictions on Western influence in art, academia and religion.”7 Page
also cites a philosophy professor from Shanghai’s Fudan University: “Mao doesn’t
sell. Communism doesn’t sell. But Confucianism and other traditional thinking can
make sense.”8 This shows how ideas that have formed Chinese cultural identity are
deeply ingrained, and it “makes sense” for China to turn to them again. So how
can design and construction be more informed by China’s own philosophical roots?
The following chapters attempt to make sense of this question.
Fourth, from the architectural literature itself, Jianfei Zhu has called for “a
different criticality” for Chinese architecture.9 This is in response to Critical
Theory or, insofar as its application to architecture is concerned, critical theory.
I explain the capital/lowercase distinction in Chapter 5. Zhu has added his voice
to a growing chorus of theorists who have now tired of the “criticalist” approach
to architectural theorizing. To wit the argument that we must resist the capitalist
tendency to make everything an instrumental means towards a sameness of universal
culture—e.g. “Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie,
the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities”10—takes on a
peculiar set of overtones in the Chinese case. That China needs to be assessed
through a criticalist lens is clear: just count the number of Starbucks and McDonald’s
in Beijing alone, if you can. But Zhu’s call for a different criticality for China is
what interests me here. It would be one that reforms:
the idea of the critical by bringing in a “relational” perspective, so that the

agenda is no longer critique as confrontation or negation of the opposed other,
but critique as participation with and possible reform of the related other,
4 Introduction
including agents of power, capital and natural resource, in an ethical and

organic universe.11
I don’t know how much Zhu realizes what he has here (e.g. “an ethical and
organic universe”), because what he says opens the way for a Chinese philosophy
of architecture. Zhu doesn’t flesh out this point. The following chapters do.
* * *
Let me return to my first point for why we need a Chinese philosophical foundation
for comprehending the architectural situation in China: the past is always present
in a culture’s ways of being. I elaborate on this here because it gives a sense of my
method in the chapters to follow. Specifically, I look to philosophical principles
to inform assessments of built forms and environments, ultimately to inform
observations about how to move forward in design thinking and process. Often
this entails a comparative approach. For instance, consider two philosophers,
Aristotle and Zhuangzi. Both are second-generation outflows of great first-
generation thinkers: Plato and the individual we call Laozi, although the name,
meaning Old Sage, may be titular for a general outlook that coalesced in the
DaodeJing. Here is Aristotle:
Just as with other crafts, we can only acquire virtue after first undertaking
activating activities. We must first produce the things we wish to learn, for
only in the process of producing these things do we learn how to do them.
For example, only by building a house do we become builders, and only by
playing the harp do we become harpists.12
Note here the intimate relation between the production of empirical things—
houses, music (the focus here seems to be on handling the harp itself)—and
embodied expressions of virtue. Aristotle went further, by famously saying that art
entails the production of a class of things that nature perhaps began, but cannot
bring to a finish.13 Human being, therefore, is central to the crafting of a cultural-
moral world in material terms, on Aristotle’s view. But here is Zhuangzi:
The mountain forests, the great open plains! Shall they make me joyful, shall
they fill me with happiness? But even before my joy is done, sorrow has
come to take its place . . . How sad it is! In being some merely specific being,
every person in the world is nothing but a temporary lodging house! Indeed,
they understand what they encounter but not what is never encountered . . .
merely to put what your understanding understands into some kind of order—
that is just shallowness.14
As Chapter 1 will explain, the Chinese correlative view is such that human
being-ness tends not to be uniquely set apart from the larger workings of the
Introduction 5
organicism of things. Instead it resides only in a “temporary lodging house.” The

emphasis here is on change, and on relative perspectives from different vantage
points in the larger correlative whole. There is a sense that nothing is ever
“settled,” or if it is, that it falls short of capturing the depths of being as a totality.
In the Greco-European tradition, moral rectitude goes through, and hence is
expressed by, physical objects of craft, of making and performing. This is one
motivation behind the continuous production of architectural theory in the West,
to wit we must get right our infusions of moral ideals in the buildings we build.
But in China, excellence of being is not always dependent on infusions of moral
value into material objects. This non-necessary relation between morality and
materiality is not only in Zhuangzi; we also see it in Confucian ideas. In fact, Wan
Juren writes this in regard to the Confucian notion of the morally perfected person
(cheng2 ren2):
The aim of such a person’s life does not lay in pursuing the sort of specialized
craft or skill that would result in material achievement . . . craftsmanship is
thus not a necessary prerequisite to becoming a perfected person . . . the first
and primary task for a person hoping to possess virtue is to forge his or her
moral character and cultivate a personal, internal virtuous nature, rather than
to externally pursue any kind of technical perfection or realization of material
end.15
In China, moral instantiation occurs in between relational social roles, for which
material venues are essentially stages upon which these enactments of li3 (moral
etiquette, often translated ritual, or propriety) take place. Elsewhere I have argued
that relationally rooted Confucian benevolence (ren2) spatializes virtue in traditional
Chinese venues.16 The moral focus in Chinese architectural settings is on the people
and their social enactments. This is not to say that traditional Chinese built forms
did not have a characteristic “look.” Just the opposite: I show in Chapter 2 that
the characteristic look of Chinese architecture remained the same for centuries. In
fact this look has become a caricature of Chinese culture: the post-and-lintel wood
frame system, the distinctive dou3 gong3 brackets supporting the roof, the roofline
lilting upwards at the eaves. But the very constancy of Chinese built forms, once
fixed, indicates there was no agenda to project onto them ever-changing moral
intentions.
What about feng1 shui3? Isn’t conforming environmental design to the workings
of “wind-water,” which is to say, to the natural cosmos, a moral agenda? It is, and
feng shui is still widely practiced today in Asia, with devoted followings in the
West as well. But we need to grasp the philosophical relationship of feng shui with
moral-physical expressions. Feng shui is something of the reverse of infusing material
forms with human moral intentionality. Feng shui is about losing human
individuality into the larger cosmos, such that positioning alone assures beneficial
outcomes. This wording from a standard feng shui guide on the mass market is
illustrative:
6 Introduction
in the case of a child who seems to be suffering from minor ailments, or is

only achieving low grades at school, the answer may lie in the height and
size of his or her desk or the positioning of the bed in relation to a window.17
If we get beyond the commercial packaging of feng shui, we find that it is steeped
in centuries-old practices of divination traceable to the I Jing, or the Book of Changes.
It is not clear when this early book of divination came into existence, only that it
predates all the early Chinese philosophical schools. This is to say that the I Jing,
at least the vitalist bent that characterizes it, informs them all. In Chapter 1, I explain
the almost infinite moving parts of this divinational outlook. But it is precisely this
dynamism of feng shui that renders moral reflection in fixed material expressions
a non-priority.
Consider now Figure I.1. This is a housing project under construction, as I
write this introduction, in Ningbo, China. When complete it will consist of many
high-rise towers in a gated precinct, typical of those being built in vast numbers
all over China. The marketing line for this particular development is “consulate-
style housing.” Apparently consulate style means something with rounded arches,
perhaps neoclassical, perhaps the Colosseum in Rome? Cranes everywhere. And
on the ground, workers pushing handcarts filled with stone and aggregate. But
before we pass a judgment of “pastiche,” the deeper approach is to recognize that
Chinese philosophy accommodates this state of affairs. When we toss in Zhuangzi’s
temporariness of physical housing, Confucian priorities of relational moral values
as opposed to infusing moral meanings into material forms; and even when we
recognize that feng shui practice may merely entail placing a gold bar at a strategic
FIGURE I.1 “Consulate-style” housing under construction, Ningbo.

Introduction 7
location in my dwelling unit in a building designed in no particular way (see Figure

1.4), the result might be . . . consulate-style high-rises in Ningbo. Granted, making
housing look “consulate style” is indeed taking a moral position. But the point is
that it can be any style precisely because, prior to 1840, Chinese structures were
not motivated by an ideology of style. And post 1840, the proliferation of styles in
Chinese buildings underlines the fact that there is, really, no “there” in terms of
an indigenous theoretical tradition to guide design thinking. You cannot have
pastiche unless you have some theoretical framework that informs what is not
pastiche.
* * *
The book is divided into past, present, and future. I have said enough to indicate
these are not hermetically sealed compartments. The past is in the present, and the
future, whatever it will be, will be derived from the past and present. These divisions
are for heuristic purposes so that the material of the book can be coherently arranged.
But I ask the reader to see all seven chapters as an ensemble.
Chapter 1 introduces the Chinese correlative view and compares it with the
Baconian-Cartesian view of the Greco-European tradition. The focus is on how
correlativism has informed historic Chinese built environments, and human
experiences within them, under the headings of fluidity, fixity, porosity, and
horizontality.
Chapter 2 compares “houses for Plato and Confucius.” This chapter explains
why Plato’s houses—that is, architecture of the Greco-European tradition—tend
to constantly change in visual attributes, while the Confucian “house,” as expressed
in the imperial system, remained largely the same in physical attributes for centuries,
until the modern era.
Chapter 3 connects the aesthetics of Chinese built environments with Chinese
philosophy. Here, I legitimize “an aesthetics of clutter” as not only a philosophically
understandable reality, but as a reality to be accommodated moving forward. In
brief, I argue that while the Greco-European outlook emphasizes proportion in
architecture and environment, resulting in a penchant for orderliness, the Chinese
philosophical outlook prizes pattern. Indeed, the very Chinese word for culture
(wen2) can be traced back to a pictograph depicting cross-stitch patterns reminiscent
of embroidery.18 This aesthetics of pattern contrasts with an aesthetics of proportion
in that pattern is open-ended as to patterns of what.
Chapters 4 and 5 address the present in Chinese architecture, a period spanning
from 1840 to the present day. Here I take European philosophical constructs and
use them to assess architectural developments in China during this period. Why
do I borrow from European ideas when my whole aim is to derive a philosophy
of architecture from Chinese sources? Well, because China borrowed from
European ideas. In Chapter 4, I take the phenomenology of thinkers such as Husserl
and Heidegger to comprehend how, even as European ideas began to promote
phenomenological immediacy in opposition to scientism during this time, China’s
8 Introduction
embrace of positivist science resulted in the loss of phenomenological immediacy

that is at the root of the historic Chinese correlative view. I call this the loss of
apperception in Chapter 4, and I explain the enormous consequences this had on
Chinese architecture of the early twentieth century, and even to this day.
In Chapter 5, I address how structuralist ideology informed Chinese culture
during the New Culture Movement, and the May Fourth Movement, in the 1910s
and 1920s. Structuralism is in fact at the root of Liang Sicheng’s thinking, and
I explain in what way, to wit that architecture can be conceived of as comprised
of a vocabulary. Poststructuralism is also addressed in Chapter 5; this is because,
in China, these two structuralistic outlooks did not necessarily happen in sequence,
but rather somewhat in parallel. And so Chinese architecture of the early twentieth
century betrayed postmodernist traits long before Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks
innovated this theoretical outlook in the West. Finally, Chapter 5 addresses critical
theory as part and parcel of poststructuralist thinking. I suggest why critical theory
has limits for current Chinese architecture and, with Jianfei Zhu, call for a different
criticality. This is the transition to considering the future.
Chapter 6 bears the title of this book, “A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture.”
I am careful to say this is merely the start of a conversation. But again, my aim is
to propose a philosophical underlayment that describes and explains not only the
status but also the ontology of “Chinese architecture” writ large. I propose different
snapshots of Chinese built contexts and suggest ways to read them through various
lenses of Chinese philosophy. For instance, I cite Wang Shu’s work as one
example—not the only example, but one example—of a calligraphic handling of
designing buildings and environments that is in grain with a historic Chinese sense
of being. I am also prescriptive: I suggest ways that Chinese philosophy can be
extended to embrace moral li3 (ritual, etiquette) and metaphysical li3 (principle) to
inform excellence in construction detailing. My aim here is not to be prescriptive
vis-à-vis a set of visual attributes, as if the enormous bulk of architecture in China
can be brought under a sameness of looks. That would be ridiculous. My aim is
to suggest ways of theorizing Chinese architecture drawing from China’s own
philosophical roots, even while recognizing that we cannot go back to a simplistic
application of ancient ideas; we need to weave those ideas in with European ones.
Chapter 7 addresses the power of digital technology to alter design thinking
and process globally. I have published previously on this topic, having coined the
term the New Virtualism to denote digitally driven design thinking and design
research.19 Here I explicitly connect New Virtualist traits to Chinese philosophy,
and ask: If the Industrial Revolution discombobulated the Chinese correlative view,
can the Cyber Revolution somehow reaffirm aspects of correlativism? My aim in
this concluding chapter is to make sure that, as we enter the Cyber Age, China
doesn’t do the same—at least in the realm of architecture—as it did in response
to the Industrial Revolution, which was to reject its own ideological roots to
wholeheartedly embrace European ideas. There are elements of cyber connectivity
that resonate strikingly with elements of early Chinese philosophy. Chapter 7
highlights some of these resonances for architecture in China moving forward.
Introduction 9
* * *
I use Pinyin for Chinese terms. Exceptions to this are citations from translations
that do not use Pinyin (e.g. Wing Tsit-Chan; Tao in lieu of Dao). Upon first mention
of a term in a chapter, I include the tone of each character; for instance: dao4. I
don’t do this for standard names (e.g. Beijing, Laozi, and so on).
Also, I realize the awkwardness of “Greco-European” in lieu of using the more
ambiguous term “West.” Sometimes the flow of the text reads more smoothly if
I just say “West.” But I want the reader to know I am sensitive to caricaturing
what I am addressing into the largely inaccurate “East-West” terminology we come
across so often. “Greco-European” is the more accurate term. I don’t use “East”
in the book, because, there, my only focus is China.
Lastly, I am well aware of the literature on “colonialism,” specifically Edward
Said’s critique of how the European West (there’s that word) has constructed
understandings of “the Orient” for its own purposes. Early in the writing of this
book, I decided not to weight the colonialist aspect too much. The abuse Western
nations heaped on China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well
documented, and we cannot address modern Chinese culture without a deep
understanding of these abuses. But the result of cultural formation in modern China
is not as clear-cut as Said’s theory often implies. As Arif Dirlik has noted, cultural
formation when a dominant foreign culture impacts a “weaker” colonialized
culture is never simplistically unidirectional. It takes two.20 And as I show in Chapters
4 and 5, China embraced Western technology, and Western presence, in many
ways. My task here is to deal with ideas, not so much grievances, and how those
ideas shaped, and can shape, architecture in China. But even as I note my light
use of “orientalism,” just by deriving Chinese architectural theory from Chinese
roots is in its own way a resistance against the colonialist tendency to assume Western
theory has all the answers, which is still the dominant default view. So what exactly
is Chinese architecture?
Notes
1 See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book 1, Chapter 3, Section 2; and Book
3, Chapter 3, Section 6.
2 See A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, IL: Open Court
Publishing, 1989): “a cosmos of the old kind [i.e. of the Chinese kind] has also an
advantage to which post-Galilean science makes no claim; those who live in it know
not only what is but what should be. In correlating one is not yet detached from the
spontaneous comparing and connecting which precedes analysis, in which expecting the
same as before one is already responding in favor of it or against; in anticipating what
will happen one knows how to act. The objectivized world of modern science dissolves
this primitive synthesis of fact and value, and in facilitating successful prediction leaves
us to find our values elsewhere. Many are unhappy to be thus exiled from the sources
of value; Westerners today who toss coins to read the hexagrams seem actually to feel
more at home in the traditional cosmos of China,” 350.
3 Limin Zheng, CCTV.com English, “Liang Sicheng – Father of Modern Chinese
Architecture”, http:/cctv.cntv.cn/lm/journeysintime/20110617/105582.shtml, accessed
March 7, 2015.
10 Introduction
4 Author interview of Yan Meng at the Urbanus Beijing Office, October 21, 2015.
5 Author interview of Yung Ho Chang at FCJZ Architects, Beijing, October 22, 2015.
6 Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval, The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in
China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 244.
7 Jeremy Page, “In China, Confucius Makes a Comeback,” Wall Street Journal, September
21, 2015: A1 and A10.
8 Ibid., A10.
9 Jianfei Zhu, “A Global Site and a Different Criticality,” in Architecture of Modern China:
A Historical Critique,169–198.
10 This is Kenneth Frampton citing Paul Ricoeur in Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical
Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern
Culture (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1987), 16–30 (16).
11 Jianfei Zhu, op. cit., 198.
12 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1103a31. I cite this from Wan Junren, “Contrasting
Confucian Virtue Ethics and Macintyre’s Aristotelian Virtue Theory,” trans. Edward
Slingerland, in Robin R. Wang, ed., Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 150.
13 Aristotle, Physics III.2.8.
14 Zhuangzi, Chapter 22, “Knowinghood Journeyed North” in Zhuangzi, The Essential
Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2009), 161.
15 Ibid., 146.
16 David Wang, “A Form of Affection: Sense of Place and Social Structure in the Chinese
Courtyard Residence,” Journal of Interior Design 32:1 (September 2006), 28–39.
17 Man-Ho Kwok, The Feng Shui Kit: The Chinese Way to Health, Wealth and Happiness,
at Home and at Work (Boston, MA: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995), 10.
18 Haun Saussy, “The Prestige of Writing: Wen-2, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography,”
Sino-Platonic Papers 75:2 (February, 1997), 2. Saussy lists the following meanings for wen-
2: markings; patterns; stripes, streaks, lines, veins; whorls; bands; writing, graph,
expression, composition; ceremony, culture, refinement, education, ornament, elegance,
civility . . . literature, etc.
19 David Wang, “Towards a New Virtualist Design Research Programme,” FORM-
Akademisk 5:2 (2012), Art. 2, 1–15.
20 On this rejection of a simplistic view that Orientialism is merely an imposition of the
West on “the Orient” see Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of
Orientalism,” History and Theory 35:4 (1996), 96–118.
PART I
Past
1
ARCHITECTURE AND
EXPERIENCE IN THE CHINESE
CORRELATIVE VIEW
The painting shown here is titled Wang Xizhi Watching Geese (Figure 1.1). It is by
the Yuan dynasty painter Qian Xuan (1235–1305 CE).
FIGURE 1.1 Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, Qian Xuan (1235–1305 CE).
The subject of the painting, Wang Xizhi, lived almost a thousand years earlier
(303–61 CE). He was one of China’s greatest calligraphers. It is said that he loved
watching geese because their graceful manner inspired his brushstrokes. Wang Xizhi
is famously associated with a collection of poems titled From the Orchid Pavilion.
So Qian Xuan’s painting depicts the calligrapher as he engages in his favorite pastime.
One of the poems of the Orchid Pavilion collection is as follows:
Looking up: blue sky’s end.

Looking down: green water’s brim.
Deep solitude: rimless view.
Before the eyes, a Pattern displays itself.
Immense, transformation!
A million differences, none out of tune.
Pipings all variegated:
What fits me, nothing strange.1
14 Past
Calligraphy, art, watching geese, deep solitude. Immense transformations. In

fact, a million differences, none of which are out of tune. And almost as an aside:
an open-air pavilion, in which one stands just to look beyond it . . . to a “rimless
view.” Chinese architecture began as a collection of things among which were
buildings. This is most evident in Chinese landscape painting. Humans and
buildings are typically small in comparison to the larger natural setting. This particular
painting is a scroll, which itself assists in conveying the endless quality of experiences
as “rimless.” Chinese painters felt no obligation to fill their paintings with
perspectival detail. Here, the emptiness in much of the right portion of the
painting is water, an impression created by a few squiggles rippling around the
geese, and a distant shore. But beyond that, where waters end and sky begins is
negotiable; there is no horizon line to demarcate the difference. Cartesian
coordinates affixing things to locations are not needed because horizon and sky
exist as part of the participation of the viewer in the world of the painting. It would be
like our own experience in such a setting: we would not need to say “there is the
horizon” prior to an awareness of its presence. The lack of propositional definition
in Chinese landscape painting encourages a phenomenology of presence. Freedom
from perspectival constraints embrace the viewer into Wang Xizhi’s rimless world.
Now contrast Qian Xuan’s painting with this woodcut by Albrecht Dürer
(Figure 1.2).
FIGURE 1.2 Nude and Artist (1525), by Albrecht Dürer.
The mission of the artist at right is clear: to accurately represent the subject at
left. A grid has been set up to aid his task, and by this device the artist is already
separated from his subject. Far from “a million differences, none out of tune,” here
a precise set of coordinates determine whether or not the artist’s representation
(note: re-presentation) is “correct.” If he does not follow the coordinates, the artist
falls short of his mission. His counterpart, Wang, is leisurely taking in “pipings all
variegated . . . nothing strange.” But this artist is on edge, as if walking a tightrope;
he must pay keen attention so as to capture every detail via the grid. We also know
our place: we are spectators of the artist’s efforts. Perhaps we root for him to get it
right. Or perhaps we think we can do better—which would mean kindly asking
The Chinese Correlative View 15
him to step aside, since getting it right requires sitting in his exact location and
nowhere else. We are therefore not “in” this world; we are just looking in.
I suggest two heuristic diagrams (Figures 1.3a and b).
FIGURES 1.3a AND b Two heuristic Eye/I diagrams.
The key difference between 1.3a and 1.3b is the location of the Eye/I. By this
nomenclature I mean both an individual consciousness (an I; or a you) as well as
the general disposition of how a culture as a whole—the culture that is a composite
of all of the individual consciousness that comprise it—sees things; this corporate
cultural seeing is denoted by the Eye. Hence, the Eye/I. Seeing what things? Seeing
all things in the cosmos; in fact how the cosmos itself is seen. In 1.3a, the Eye/I
is coterminous within the workings of the cosmos, and its unreflective posture is
to experience all things from this immersed position. Wang Xizhi’s enjoyment of
“pipings all variegated/what fits me, nothing strange” is an appreciation not uttered
by someone standing apart from the million transformations, which he only
subsequently judges as “none strange.” No; Wang XiZhi’s enjoyment comes from
his own participation in these organic transformations; he is merely part of the larger
spontaneous unfolding.
Here is how the twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Fung Yulan describes
this state of affairs:
Whether the table that I see before me is real or illusory, and whether it is
only an idea in my mind or is occupying objective space, was never seriously
considered by Chinese philosophers . . . since epistemological problems arise
only when a demarcation between the subject and the object is emphasized.
And in the aesthetic continuum, there is no such demarcation. In it the
knower and the known is one whole.2
The Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber (author of the essay “I-Thou”)

describes this same state of affairs as follows: “The order of nature is not broken,
its perceptible limits merely extend; the abundant flow of the life force is nowhere
arrested, and all that lives bears the seed of the spirit.”3 More recently, Sebastien
Billioud and Joel Thoraval term this way of being continuism: “A consequence of
this worldview is that there is not separation between sociopolitical and cosmic
16 Past
spheres.”4 Billioud and Thoraval’s recent fieldwork demonstrates that there is still
significant interest in China at all demographic levels for this outlook in daily life.
In architectural terms, the Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong, one of the more
philosophically grounded Chinese practitioners today, expresses this sensibility in
propounding his theory of Shanshui (mountain-water) City: “The fundamental
principle of ancient Chinese architecture is the maintenance of the order that governs
heaven and earth, and all existence. From the onset, architecture and environment
were considered as a single entity.”5
Fung’s and Buber’s, Billioud and Thoraval’s, and Ma’s observations all resonate
with a term of the sinologist A.C. Graham’s that I will repeatedly use in this book:
correlative. Figure 1.3a diagrams the correlative worldview of the Chinese outlook.
Here is how Graham describes this outlook:
a cosmos of the old kind [i.e. of the Chinese kind] has also an advantage to
which post-Galilean science makes no claim; those who live in it know not
only what is but what should be. In correlating one is not yet detached from
the spontaneous comparing and connecting which precedes analysis, in
which expecting the same as before one is already responding in favor of it
or against; in anticipating what will happen one knows how to act.6
This “knowing how to act” is not deductive reasoning; it derives more from a
sense of how one’s being is organically linked to all other percolations in the rimless
correlative cosmos. The Eye/I is immersed in it, and cultivating this unity is why,
for instance, Daoism values taking “no action” (wu2 wei2),7 but also why Confucius
himself held that by the time he was seventy, he could “follow my heart’s desires
without overstepping the bounds of propriety”8—the point being that all his actions
would organically emit out of what nature would do anyway. All of this places a
premium on a subjective sense of being at one with the workings of the cosmos.
Graham contrasts the correlative view with the outlook diagrammed in Figure
1.3b:
The objectivized world of modern science dissolves this primitive synthesis

of fact and value, and in facilitating successful prediction leaves us to find
our values elsewhere. Many are unhappy to be thus exiled from the sources
of value; Westerners today who toss coins to read the hexagrams seem actually
to feel more at home in the traditional cosmos of China.”9
In Figure 1.3b, while the Eye/I and cosmos are still in close relationship, they
are no longer in union, and this separation is denoted by the dotted line. Even the
cursory reader will see the similarity to the gridded partition between Dürer’s artist
and his subject in Figure 1.2. Once cosmos and Eye/I are separated, the unreflective
way of seeing begins to strive for certainties obtainable by precise definitions.
Everything has a place in this kind of cosmos, and what space is occupied by one
construct, by the logic of the case, cannot be occupied by something else.
Both models leave us with questions. The irony of Figure 1.3b is that, in striving
for certainties, the Eye/I itself is location-less with respect to the cosmos. To put
it more pointedly, if the cosmos is over there, why is the Eye/I over here? And
where is here? This is one way to appreciate the angst of the current state of
philosophy in the Greco-European line of ideas. While the Eye/I wants to be certain
about everything, its very position renders it difficult for it to be certain about
itself. Similarly, in Figure 1.3a, if the Eye/I is indeed coterminous with the
cosmos, why expend centuries of philosophy formulating social protocols to
achieve this oneness (Confucianism), or eradicating propositions to achieve this
nameless oneness (Daoism), or insisting that a moment of enlightenment is needed
to attain to this oneness (Chan Buddhism)?
In light of these problems, it is not my aim to promote one or the other of
these points of view. For us, the important point is to note that the Eye/I in either
case is unreflective about where it is situated. It simply takes its position as a pre-
conscious starting point from which the rest of reality is viewed. This state of affairs
is sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu’s term habitus, which is (italics his): “a system of
. . . manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather
than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and
action.”10 Bourdieu says that habitus is expressed across the board in art, politics,
sport, sex, food, etc., so that a society’s overall gestalt exhibits “a kind of affinity
of style” (italics his); the result is a “systematicity.”11 My aim in this chapter, and
in this book as a whole, is to consider the architectural implications of each habitus
diagrammed heuristically in Figure 1.3a, and in Figure 1.3b. By Chapter 4, it will
be apparent that the modern, or “present,” period for Chinese architecture involves
an overlap of the two conditions diagrammed in Figure 1.3. Indeed, this overlapped
state of affairs provides much of the material for both Chinese and European ideas
in impacting architecture in China in the twentieth century (see Figure 4.3). For
example on the Chinese side, the debates over zi4 qiang2 (self-strengthening) and
ti3 yung4 (substance versus function) were present in this overlap during the late
Qing period. On the European side, also present in the overlap were logical
positivism and “phenomenology.” The former is an attempt to reify the logical
operations of the Eye/I shown in 1.3b as the only basis for truth. Conversely, the
latter is an attempt to overcome the divide between Eye/I and cosmos, hence
producing something like a European version of Figure 1.3a. I address these matters
in Chapter 4, vis-à-vis architecture.
But perhaps the most significant European line of theory in the twentieth century
is the one that rejects both positivism and phenomenology: critical theory. Critical
theory eschews any formulation of a “subject” and an “object” as holistic
constructs.12 In this sense, critical theorists would almost certainly view the models
shown in Figure 1.3 as oversimplifications. I understand this concern. I call the
diagrams in Figure 1.3 heuristic first, because I want to, get at a pre-1840 condition
for Figure1.3a (and even for Figure 1.3b), when unreflective assumptions about
life-worlds may have been more in keeping with these diagrams. Second, the
diagrams are needed to set up the admixed overlay of the two, which, describes
18 Past
the modern condition (see again Figure 4.3). This state of affairs does exhibit the
fragmented and always-in-process realities that critical theorists hold as the only
possible conditions of human experience. At any rate, I address critical theory in
Chapter 5, where I give an appraisal of its application for theorizing architecture
in China.
In what follows in this chapter, I outline four ways the systematicity of the
correlative view diagrammed in Figure 1.3a impacts architecture and experience
in historic China: fluidities, fixities, porosities, and horizontalities. By “historic”
I generally mean prior to 1840, the date assigned to the First Opium War, for the
purposes of marking the beginning of modernity in China. Of course, the impact
of this ancient outlook on built environments is still felt today in China.
Fluidities
The distinctive trait of early Chinese cosmologies is the sheer variety of dynamic
interchanges regarded as fundamental. So by fluidities I mean the abundance of
moving parts that comprise the Chinese correlative view of the cosmos, and how
these fluidities in turn affect architecture and experience.
We begin with the I Jing, or the Book of Changes. The version we have traces
back to the dawn of the Zhou period (1046–256 BCE). This means that the text
predates all of the early Chinese philosophical schools that formed during the latter
stages of the Zhou, namely the Hundred Schools (roughly 500–221 BCE) and the
Warring States (481–221 BCE) periods, schools that ultimately resolved themselves
into Confucianism, Daoism and, during the Han period (206 BCE–220 CE),
Chinese Buddhism. The Book of Changes informed all of these schools. By the Song
dynasty (960–1279 CE), the cosmology of change was officially incorporated into
the neo-Confucian ideology promoted by the civil service examinations for all
aspiring to government service—read: for all aspiring to membership in elite
society—until 1905. It is useful to keep in mind that somewhere in any school of
Chinese philosophy are ideas of change that resonate with the Book of Changes.
By way of contrast, the early Greeks tried to overcome the constant flux of
change with permanent determinations. “The whole life of men, O Athenians,”
said Demosthenes (385–322 BCE), “whether they inhabit a great city or a small
one, is governed by nature and by laws. Of these, nature is a thing irregular, unequal,
and peculiar to the individual possessor; laws are regular, common, and the same
for all.”13 Demosthenes’s notion of nature not only covers natural phenomena, but
also has humans as “possessors” of nature. And in all cases nature is irregular and
peculiar. Laws are needed to manage quirky nature so that a city, whether large
or small, can exist and carry on as a communal enterprise.
In early China, the Legalist school did try to enact laws uniformly applicable
to all, and enforced in a draconian manner independent of Confucian emphases
on family and virtuous conduct. It didn’t work. The Qin, the state that first united
the warring states into a single Chinese polity in 221 BCE, lasted only 15 years; it
fell in 206 BCE. The Chinese cultural bent rejected this kind of “objective”
application of rigid conventions. The cultural bent throughout China’s history is
more in line with this from Appendix 3 of the Book of Changes, often quoted as a
formulation for how the cosmos began:
Therefore in the system of Yi there is the grand terminus, which produced

the two elementary forms. Those two forms produced the four emblematic
symbols, which again produced the eight trigrams. The eight trigrams served
to determine the good and evil (issues of events), and from this determination
was produced the (successful prosecution of the) great business (of life).14
This is a fluid reality. The two elementary forms are the yin1, the weak force,
and yang2, the strong force. The yin yang yielded the four symbols, which are
weak/strong yin and weak/strong yang. Each of these is represented by pairs of
dashed and solid lines. When these four pairs have additional yin and yang lines
added to each of them, the eight trigrams are produced. The I Ching, in turn,
comprises 64 pairs of trigrams, each pair called a hexagram. These hexagrams
encompass all possible permutations of existence in the cosmos, or “the great business
of life.” When a questioner consults the I Ching, the hexagram that emerges as the
answer is obtained by chance throws, either of yarrow sticks, or dice, or any number
of devices that yield patterns of six solid or dashed lines, or both.15 To read the
hexagram, one needs to know that the lines of the hexagram are also moving, as the
hexagram itself phases to its adjacent counterpart. This is a lot of change, in midst
of which the questioner receives some sense of what next to do.
At the juncture of the yin yang, besides producing the four forms leading to the
trigrams and hexagrams, the oscillations of yin yang also produce qi4.16 Qi, in turn,
can be light or heavy, the former comprising the atmosphere, the denser comprising
all matter, including human beings. Thus qi is infused into the workings of the
trigrams and hexagrams. Now, while the workings of the hexagrams are according
to inscrutable pattern, qi—the stuff that permeates the correlative whole (see again
Figures 1–3a) and is in everything and comprises everything—can be directed. This
is an important point in feng1 shui3 practice. The basic premise of feng shui is that
human situations in the correlative whole can be improved if environmental
furnishings can be arranged just so. How so? Ole Bruun describes how feng shui
placement relates to qi:
the relation between one’s own house and other buildings and constructions
in the vicinity has a major impact on the common fengshui situation, since a
larger house may catch more of the common qi at the expense of others. As
a parallel to material wealth, which is seen as a limited resource . . . qi is regarded
as a resource that can only be tapped at the expense of other people’s share.
But while access to material wealth is restricted by human politics, qi flows freely
for everyone to catch and with considerably more room for manipulation.17
20 Past
So not only does qi correlate to physical placement of buildings, qi and placement

both correlate to well-being in a parallel way that wealth does. This is not all: qi
is also a moral force that, when focused, can produce extraordinary results. Here
is the second-generation Confucian philosopher Mencius (b. 372 BCE) on the moral
capacity of qi: “Nourish it with integrity and place no obstacle in its path and it
will fill up the space between Heaven and Earth.”18 Mencius’s statement suggests
that the dynamics of natural interactions are correlated with moral excellences; at
least, lines of demarcation between the physical cosmos and moral determinations
are blurred. Thus Mencius’s words reveal just how unreflectively human being-
ness was seen as coterminous with the cosmos. There is constant interchangeability
between physicality and moral rectitude.
Here is what turns on this architecturally: environmental meanings—and hence
environmental preferences—can work differently when the emphasis is placed not
so much on the visual attributes of objects, but rather on where objects are placed.
The gold bar in Figure 1.4 is in a contemporary Chinese residence in Hangzhou
(it happens to be the home of one of my graduate students). The bar is there because
the apartment is located in a building such that its east side is regarded as inauspicious
on feng shui terms. But placing the bar with the dragon and phoenix in the living
room restores existential balance to the dwelling. All of this is aside from what the
exterior (or for that matter, the interior) design of the residence might be. So by
fluidities I do not mean physical forms that morph; I mean physical objects
experienced with an awareness of immaterial forces active in an environmental
setting. Moral meaning is indexed to placement, less to looks. Moral meaning is
FIGURE 1.4 A feng shui bar in a residence, Hangzhou.

also less indexed to the quality of craftsmanship with which objects are made,
so long as they are placed correctly (see my comments on “vernacularity” in
Chapter 6).
The gold bar demonstrates that feng shui is not only a past practice; it is pervasive
now, as Bruun’s ethnographic research clearly affirms.19 This is so even after feng
shui’s repression by the Chinese government since 1949 and even after its rejection
as unscientific by Chinese intelligentsia throughout the twentieth century. Even
as I write this, the South China Morning Post notes increasing numbers of Chinese
parents asking feng shui masters to find auspicious names for newborn children.
One family paid 20,000 yuan for the service, “and everyone was happy.”20
Consider another aspect of the yin yang: their oscillation as the source of the
trigrams. The trigrams are in turn correlated with the directions of the compass.
In the “orientations school” of feng shui (the other is the “forms school”; I give
an example of its practices in Chapter 3), environmental placement is by means
of the Chinese compass. But this is not a simple procedure, not least because the
24 coordinates of the compass change each year. What is more, the compasses used
by orientation school feng shui masters are extremely complex, so much so that
the concentric rings of signs—up to 30 rings, with the trigrams usually forming
the inner ring—defy any deductive or inductive logic.21 What we see is an
emphasis on a subjective feel for placing things such that to the European outlook
would be groundless. Hence a feng shui master’s credibility is based on subjective
realities. It is what I call the Chinese correlative imagination. This is a propensity
to see immaterial conditions as equally “real” as all the measurable exertions entailed
in building a physical structure: preparing the site, procuring materials, cutting and
erecting and joining them, and so on. Alongside these practical activities is a
commitment to immaterial factors. Klaas Ruitenbeek gives an example: If
construction is needed in a year in which the desired orientation is inauspicious,
rituals can be performed to “transfer the center” of the house to a location such
that, from the new center, the project can be realized auspiciously. Ruitenbeek’s
point is that the owner can always get what he or she wants, good year or bad,
provided the requisite rituals are performed.22 Rather than reject this as sleight of
hand, we should see this to be the operational meaning of ritual as the effective,
though not necessarily causal, link between material and immaterial life in a
correlative world. Bao Pao, cultural advisor to Ma Yansong’s office (MAD,
Beijing), notes that this is an aspect of ritual (li3, of which more later) that is rarely
appreciated now.23 Ritual is not empty formality; it is an enactment in which
material life intertwines with immaterial realities.
Another aspect of the fluidity of yin yang is the Five Elements (wu3 xing2). Here
is the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073 CE):
The ultimate of non-being and the great ultimate! The great ultimate
through movement generates yang. When its activity reaches its limit, it
becomes tranquil. Through tranquility the great ultimate generates yin.
When tranquility reaches its limit, activity begins again . . . By transformation
22 Past
of yang and its union with yin, the Five Agents of water, fire, wood, metal
and earth arise. When these five material forces (qi) are distributed in
harmonious order, the four seasons run their course.24
The Five Elements are fluid because they are not elements at all; they are five
goings (wu3 xing2). Even in current Chinese usage, xing means to walk, to go. Suffice
it to say that it denotes movement. The five xing are better viewed as energies or
potentialities, each giving way to the next in cyclical fashion. All sorts of
environmental elements are indexed to these five elements. For example, water is
associated with winter and the color black. Water gives way to wood, which is
associated with spring and the color blue-green. Wood gives way to fire, which
is associated with summer and the color red.25 In the correlative view, color is not
a “secondary quality,” as the British empiricist John Locke would have it.26 Color
is organically apiece with the workings of the cosmos, and it informs how society
conducts itself. A.C. Graham:
Thus at the beginning of the year, when “the East wind melts the ice and
the hibernating insects stir,” the Historiographer reports “Such-and-such a
day is the start of spring; the fullness of potency is in Wood.” The ruler,
wearing blue-green, then leads out his nobles to welcome spring in the
East suburb, rewards civil officials, issues orders to be merciful . . .
Correspondingly, when the “chill winds come, the white dew falls and the
cold cicada chirps” . . . The ruler wearing white leads out the nobles to
welcome autumn in the West suburb.27
Note here that social ritual is the locus of cultural meaning; the backdrop is the
built environment. Much akin to the workings depicted in Figure 1.1, where Wang
Xizhi is in his pavilion only to look beyond it, here the physical accoutrements
form a stage upon which social meaning takes place.
And many of these built environments have historically been in wood
construction. Much in the literature bemoans the fact that there are only a few
Chinese structures still standing from the Song and, before that, Tang periods. What
is more, visitors to China’s many historic sites are sometimes dismayed at how ancient
buildings seem disheveled and unkempt, with paint peeling off the walls, and grass
growing on the tile roofs. The rationale used to be that perhaps the government
had insufficient funds for “preservation.” These days that idea is less persuasive. After
all, the visitors just flew in on Air China in the latest Boeing equipment, bedazzled
by ultra-contemporary airports at every stop (see Figure 7.8). It is not that the culture
does not value its profound historical heritage as expressed in centuries-old built
structures. Other factors are in play aside from funding priorities to achieve a
“preserved” look, as if the past must somehow be frozen in the present in pristine
form. Liang Sicheng himself (1901–1972), often considered the father of modern
Chinese architecture,28 urgently called for the preservation of ancient structures when
he returned in 1927 from his Beaux-Arts education at the University of
Pennsylvania.29 But all of this pressure for historic preservation might itself be
a Western angst. A preservation mentality assumes a philosophy of resistance to change.
It presumes a linear elapse of time, with certain objects along this line viewed as
privileged, and hence worth saving, perhaps as “brakes” against time’s inexorable
forward movement. But in a correlative world in which fluid change is fundamental,
wood gives way to fire, fire to soil, and so on, in a cyclical process. That is all.
Fixities
Fixities complement fluidities. Nothing is diametrically opposed in the correlative
view. In this section I address the fact that for human community to thrive, certain
fixed conventions necessarily emerge in the fluid correlative whole; and I consider
the implications of these fixed constructions for architecture and experience.
The dynamics between fluidity and fixity are best illustrated by the push–pull
that characterizes Daoist versus Confucian sentiments, both primary colors to the
Chinese cultural gestalt. “As soon as there are names, one ought to know that it
is time to stop.”30 Sentiments such as this are basic to the Daodejing, the primary
Daoist text, which dates back at least to the fifth century BCE. Philosophical Daoism
viewed words as departures from Dao and envisioned an ideal state in which the
sage ruler’s power emits out of wordless spontaneity: “The nameless uncarved block
is but freedom from desire; and if I cease to desire and remain still, the empire
will be at peace of its own accord.”31 Names—that is, words—are fixities that the
Daoists sought to minimize.
In contrast, when asked how to rule a state effectively, Confucius’s first action
was to rectify names:
Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about governing. Confucius responded,

“Let the lord be a true lord, the ministers true ministers, the fathers true
fathers, and the sons true sons . . . [If these fail] even if there is sufficient
grain, will I ever get to eat it?”32
The Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zheng4 ming2) held that
social labels such as father, ruler, minister, and son were not incidental to a person,
but essential to him or her. To wit if you are a son, that is the piece of the cosmos
that you are, a social role cut out from the larger primordial fabric. A prosperous
society is composed of all persons living up to the nature of their social roles.
Conversely, Donald Munro has pointed out that early Chinese terms for “wrong”
also meant to go across a boundary (guo4); so, for instance, if you do not fulfil
your role as a son, you may not be a sinner, but you are certainly a trespasser.33
Confucianism’s practice of endless social protocols (li3, sometimes translated
“ritual” or “propriety”), then, was meant to keep one true to the boundaries that
defined his or her role. Note that when Confucius achieved spontaneity at age
seventy and was able to follow his heart’s desires, he was able to do so precisely
because his actions did not “overstep the bounds of propriety.” So spontaneity
24 Past
(zi4 ran2, or allowing nature to flow through you) was germane to both the Daoist
and Confucian projects; it was just a matter of when spontaneity can be achieved.
For Daoism, it can happen at any time; and this posture will greatly influence Chan
Buddhism later in China’s history. For Confucianism, spontaneity may come after
seventy years of making sure you are within the bounds of your role, by practicing
li3. That the Chinese culture holds both views so dearly underlines the comple-
mentarity between fluidity and fixity.
This complementarity is often housed within one person. For instance, in the
aftermath of the collapse of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the Confucianism
that had been the basis for government protocol for four centuries was in disarray.
The ensuing disillusionment encouraged a revival of Daoism, called neo-Daoism.
Neo-Daoists promoted such hard-to-translate ideals as feng1 liu2,34 evoking a life
lived totally free like the blowing of the wind. The point for us is that the ones
most attracted to neo-Daoist mysticism were themselves Confucian literati. One
such was Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), who penned a commentary on the writings
of the Daoist philosopher Zuangzi (d. 286 BCE). Here is a well-known line
from this commentary: “Although the sage is in the midst of government, his mind
seems to be in the mountain forest . . . his abode is in the myriad things.”35 The
Confucian official is trapped at his desk, in all of the physicality of the architectural
setting. But his mind is in the mountain forests and his real abode is in the myriad
things. This fluid–fixed tension, diagrammed in Figure 1.5a, deepens our under-
standing of the environment shown in Figure 1.5b, where the simple architecture
is fixed, while the plantings explode around it.
The Chinese correlative imagination unreflectively accepts the interplay between
fixity and fluidity and expresses it in the visual attributes of built environments.
The Chinese courtyard residence, or si4 he2 yuan4 (hereafter siheyuan), ideally
accommodates this interplay. The siheyuan is a four-sided courtyard with rectilinear
structures on the sides. These surrounding structures read as a single ensemble in
relation to each other by virtue of the courtyard. In this venue, the unitized structures
themselves are analogous to Confucian fixity, while the courtyards, often infilled
with gardens, express Daoist and, later, Buddhist spontaneity (Figure 1.5b). The
experience of the space would not be holistic if one or the other were not in place.
Andrew Boyd has noted that, while buildings in China were rarely the focus of
theoretical contemplation, gardens were another matter. “There was supposed to
be ‘no rules’ for gardens . . . the individual imagination working on the peculiarities
or the inspiration of the site was to have free play.”36
The garden helped situate the Confucian official “in the myriad things.”
Particularly in southern China, such as in the literati gardens of Suzhou, the garden
spaces themselves can be quite small. But their smallness underlines the fact that
the correlative imagination is not bounded by physical barriers. At the imaginary
level, we have what amounts to a tapestry of patterns composed of fixed deter-
minations interlaced with fluid possibilities. And the acme of experience is at the imaginary
level. Here is an excerpt from “The Imaginary Garden of Liu Shilong,” written by
a Ming dynasty Confucian official:
FIGURE 1.5a The square and curve captures Confucian rectitude (square) overlapped
by Daoist spontaneity (curve).
FIGURE 1.5b A courtyard in the Yu4 Yuan2, a garden that dates back to the Ming
dynasty, Shanghai.
26 Past
A tall hall of several bays is called ‘All-Regarding’ because flowers of every

season are all there. The five colors intermingle, and it is splendid as an elegant
city. Apart from the all-Regarding Hall, there is the Pavilion of Spring
Fragrances, the Pavilion of Summer Splendor, the Pavilion of Autumn
Perfumes, and the Pavilion of Wintery Elegance . . . Beautiful textures and
pure fragrances are offered by the earth . . . and people take advantage of
them as they compose rhapsodies, holding cups to their mouths. Such is the
beauty of the flowering plants in my garden.37
The translator of this article, Stanislaus Fung, highlights the fact that the Chinese
name for this garden, Wu2 You3 Yuan2, can be rendered the Garden that is not
Around. Wu you, meaning “not having” is not the same as the English “not existing.”
The English words force a clear alternative: the garden either exists or it does not.
In contrast, wu you suggests that the garden may well exist, but just not around
here. The correlative imagination takes pleasure in the connotation that it may be
around somewhere. This is a kind of aesthetic pleasure that a linguistic term
stimulates, a pleasure that is perhaps not available to those who do not live in that
linguistic system.
Now, the courtyard typology can be linked together without limit. The
Forbidden City, home to the Ming and Qing emperors, is essentially a courtyard
home writ large: it has many courtyards (see Figure 2.6). The courtyard typology
can telescope from a single private residence to enormous urban scales. In historic
Beijing, for example, the Forbidden City sits within the rectilinear precinct of the
Imperial City, which is in turn situated within the rectilinear zone of the Inner
City (during Ming and Qing times the Outer City also abutted the southern wall
of the Inner City).38 Many sources address historic Chinese city planning.39 My
point here is simply that the city itself can be read as composed of increasingly
larger courtyard residences. These courtyard units are fixities in Chinese planning.
And when we see that the empire itself is demarcated by a Great Wall, we get a
sense that the experience of Chinese architecture in general is about an experience
of interiority. Cultural life takes place within courtyards defined by walls. These
courtyard units—and I term them Chinese courtyard units, or CAUs, in Chapter
2—are architectural fixities. Thus the telescoping scales of the CAU parallel the
telescoping scales of the moral practices embedded within the Chinese ideal of
family ( jia1). I explain this further below. So it is not only gardens that comprise
a materially fluid dimension in Chinese architecture. Familial relationships as
defined by Confucian li cultivate a moral presence that has a spatially fluid aspect
within the confines of walled ensembles. For instance, the philosopher Mary
Bockover has argued that the key Confucian moral value ren2, often translated
benevolence, cannot be experienced unless it is enacted between persons.40
Confucian benevolence, then, is spatiality embedded. That spatiality is realized in
the interiority of the courtyard typology. Life happens inside, where there are many
moving parts, whether of gardens or of enactments of human relations.
I suggest another factor driving the fixed–fluid dynamic in historic Chinese

architecture. I have in mind the Chinese pictographic language. The excerpt above
from Liu Shilong alludes to the pleasures of “composing rhapsodies” while in garden
settings. I argue for a calligraphic aspect that is not only present in how fixity–fluidity
works in the correlative imagination, but perhaps undergirds the dynamic itself
(more on this in Chapters 6 and 7). The Chinese pictographic system intimately informs
aesthetic experience in the correlative view. There is debate in the literature about the
nature of pictographs and how they differ from alphabetized systems in conveying
meaning. Chad Hansen, for example, holds that because Chinese characters tend
to represent their referents pictorially, the Chinese language does not deal in abstract
mental constructs.41 For example, the word for field, tian2, is a picture of a plot
of land divided into four quadrants. In contrast, the English word “field” requires
the reader to mentally picture such a thing. Hansen’s theory has received its share
of criticism.42 Not being a linguist, the technical minutiae of the debate easily move
beyond my ken, but here I am after smaller game. My suggestion is that the
connotative “penumbra” around a Chinese pictograph can be quite large, and
centuries of Chinese poetry have taken advantage of this to subsume the reader
into the broad scope of possible meanings poetic lines can hold. Wai-Lim Yip
provides an example by citing a poem by Meng Haojan from the eighth century.
The first line consists of five pictographs with the following direct translation: Move,
Boat, Moor, Smoke, Shore. Yip then cites the variety of ways this line has been
translated:
By Giles (1898): I steer my boat to anchor by the mist-clad river eyot.

By Fletcher (1919): Our boat by the mist-covered islet we tied.
By Bynner (1920): While my little boat moves on its mooring mist.
By Christy (1929): At dusk I moored my boat on the banks of the river.
By Jenyns (1944): I move my boat and anchor in the mists off an islet.43
Yip points out that in each case the English translation requires additional
syntactical structures (the italics in each case are Yip’s, indicating what was added).
These structures confine the experiential quality into a narrower scope than what
is evoked by the original words. The Chinese text itself “opens up an indeterminate
space for readers to enter and reenter for multiple perceptions rather than locking
them into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain
direction.” So we come full circle back to Figure 1.1, in which a painting draws
the viewer into its world by reducing fixities such as perspectival accuracy. By
reducing such fixities, it increases fluidities . . . to accommodate a million
differences, none strange.
But we cannot romanticize fixity–fluidity, because there is no guarantee that
the two always result in aesthetically stimulating compositions. Consider Figure
1.6, which shows a typical sight in Chinese cities: garbage dumped in the no-man’s
land between well-defined, because walled, social units. We can frame the problem
this way: meaning achieved by fixed units in relational constructs raises questions
28 Past
FIGURE 1.6 An in-between urban space in Kunming. Note the trash piled against
the wall.
as to what happens in the gaps between units. For Chinese architectural units (CAU),
such as the siheyuan, what happens between the gaps at larger scales, to say no
more, are not all gardens. These units can be family units or larger residential
compounds; or they can be walled areas for business or commercial precincts. Thus
one limitation of the fixity–fluidity interplay in the correlative imagination is that
it does not translate into a uniform continuum of aesthetic quality in physical

planning at larger scales. Within courtyard units, fixity–fluidity is generally resolved
(Figure 1.5b). But outside of these social CAUs, or more precisely, in between these
social CAUs, the physical gaps are less accommodated in the Chinese ideology
of space. The Daoist philosopher Zuangzi actually refers to “the rubbish outside
the walls” as something of a given in Chinese environments.44 So at larger urban
scales, we have what we see in Figure 1.6. Which turns us to, of all things, the
idea of family.
Porosity and the Social Role of the Wall

Perhaps no system of ideas makes the family, jia1, as essential an ingredient of its
outlook as does Chinese philosophy. For example, the neo-Confucian philosopher
Wang Yanming (1472–1529 CE), said this: “The great man regards Heaven and
Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and
the country as one person.”45 Wang is arguably the last outstanding philosopher
in the long line of great pre-dynastic and dynastic Chinese thinkers. This is to say
that his formulation is a culmination of all that went on before him vis-à-vis family
as a philosophical construct. Here is why Chinese philosophy has always been an
ethical philosophy: From the earliest days jia denoted not merely the social unit
itself; jia was at the root of Chinese metaphysics. In the I Jing, the eight trigrams
are also eight family members. And again, these trigrams form all 64 hexagrams,
which in turn regulate all things. This places jia in the mix of all deliberations for
action as directed by the I Jing. As well, jia is embedded in the little document
called The Great Learning, which dates from early Zhou times (for our purposes let
us say about 1000 BCE) and played a role in almost three millennia of Chinese
ideas. Confucius promoted it in his call for a return to early Zhou propriety (li3).
During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), when Buddhism tore families apart by
calling their sons and daughters to join the sanga, one rationale given was that these
young people could serve the greater jia of society; and besides, who could tell
that other modes of life were not once their parents?46 In the neo-Confucian revival
during the Song dynasty (960–1276 CE), the leading thinker of the day, Zhu Xi
(1130–1200 CE), elevated The Great Learning to be one of four books that all
candidates for the civil service examinations must know; and again, these exam-
inations endured until 1905. So the Great Learning was at the heart of the Chinese
correlative imagination. What does it say? Figure 1.7 takes its terse phrases and
puts them in the rationale of a loop, starting with “to order a state” at the upper
left-hand corner and moving counterclockwise. To wit the steps in the process begin
and end with family. And by the time the entire loop is achieved, the entire world
(tian1 xia4, which is to say, all of nature) is encompassed.
There is no discontinuity between familial orderliness, national well-being, and
natural well-being. In fact the logic is just the opposite: everything is subsumed
under the construct of family. This ubiquity of family in the Chinese outlook is
evident in the language itself: the term for nation is guo2 jia (nation-family); what
30 Past
To order a state,
… and all the world will be at peace

when family is regulated, state is governed …
first regulate your family when personal life cultivated, family is regulated
to regulate your family, first cultivate your personal life when the mind is rectified, personal life is cultivated
to cultivate personal life, first rectify your mind when the will becomes sincere, the mind is
rectified
to rectify your mind, first make your will sincere when knowledge is extended, the will becomes
sincere
to make your will sincere, extend your knowledge when things are investigated, knowledge is extended
To extend your knowledge, investigate things
FIGURE 1.7 A diagram of the sequential steps required to order a state, prescribed in
The Great Learning.
is ours is wo3 jia; versus what is theirs, ren2 jia. Munro: “Everything—whether
part of the past, present, or future—is part of one integrated, extended family.”47
On architectural terms, jia finds expression in walls. As fluidly and as seamlessly
as “family” moves through various stages in the Great Learning as a matter of
philosophy, the wall is evidence that it is impossible for social units to exist in the
correlative world in a completely fluid manner, as a matter of architecture. From
the earliest beginnings, walls were erected to define family units at various scales.
K.C. Chang has shown that early Chinese cities emerged when ruling clans
dispatched sons to distant areas for purposes of political control.48 Those sons in
turn built walled cities. (So, again, cities from the beginning were courtyard
residences writ large.) This is a rationale for walls from the top down. From the
bottom up, Chinese society has tended to be divided communally since earliest
times. Mencius speaks approvingly of the well–field system ( jin3 tian2 zhi4 du4),49
a method of land distribution in which, like a tic-tac-toe board, families lived off
the produce from the eight surrounding squares, while the yield of the center square
was given to the ruler. Wu Liangyong suggests that Chinese urban fabrics may
well have evolved as a patchwork of well–field squares, and he connects this
patterning directly to the evolution of the courtyard house.50 Residential precincts
were further cordoned into walled wards. The point is that Chinese communal
identity has long been shaped by walls. The wall is thus a dividing mechanism in
the seamless continuity implied by the correlative view, on the one hand, and the
social need for definitions of our family versus their family, on the other.
This mediation makes gates an important element in Chinese environments. Gates
regulate the interface between inside, nei4, and outside, wai4, for various social
entities. They are not only points of control; they are also symbols of social identity.
Experience of the historic Chinese urban texture involves continuous alternation
between nei and wai, regulated by perambulation through gates into different kinds
FIGURE 1.8a Ceremonial gate in front of a modern bank building along Chang’an
Avenue, Beijing.
FIGURE 1.8b A gate to a precinct for art and culture in Shenzhen. The gate is designed
by Urbanus Architecture, which has its Shenzhen office in this precinct.
32 Past
of interiorized social precincts, all of which, at some level, connote jia. The very
diversity of gates in Chinese cities attests that they are more than mere space dividers;
they are key players in a psychology of identity and belonging. Additionally, gates
in old city walls juxtapose with contemporary gates to give sense of place a temporal
continuity and depth. If Kevin Lynch had not confined his seminal study of urban
mental maps to cities in the United States, but had used a Chinese urban sample,
he may well have found that “gate” can be an additional category to his paths,
landmarks, edges, nodes, and districts.51 This is because gates have a way of over-
laying different hierarchies of mental mapping onto Lynch’s other categories, one
that indexes directly to feelings of social belonging. There is a sense of translucency
and fluidity to a sense of belonging as one traverses in and out of different precincts
marked by gates, because the precincts themselves can be grouped into larger areas
also marked by gates. And then you come across a gate that does not seem to mark
a precinct, perhaps because it is an older structure left standing while the urban
environs have changed. So a temporal sense is layered onto experiences of urban
spatiality.
I do not want to leave the impression that cutting up the urban fabric by walls
and gates is merely a necessary concession to physical architecture, while Chinese
philosophy has a much more seamless view of the correlative whole. This is not
true. The Confucian rectification of names mentioned earlier, that is, the
clarification of social roles, is at the core of how we make sense of the cosmos, at
least on the Confucian view. This is physically reflected in walls and gates. Within
your bounds physically, you can cultivate moral conduct morally. In fact physical
environment and moral cultivation must go hand in hand. In Chapter 2, I show
how this is one reason why the stylistic features of Chinese architecture largely
stayed constant through the centuries.
Horizontalities
Historic Chinese architecture was a horizontal reality. The agrarian nature of ancient
Chinese culture, and the vast expanses of land upon which that culture flourished,
inculcated a sense of the horizontal dimension. Early philosophical schools such as
the Sheng2 Nung2, or Divine Farmers, exemplify the almost spiritual sense of
connection the Chinese felt for the land.52 In Chapter 6, I suggest that any true
expression of contemporary Chinese architecture must accommodate awareness of
this connection to the land. Philosophically, the mystical sense for the horizontal
can be seen in the view that, when the ancient sage Laozi attained sagehood, it
was not by ascending up, but by traveling west.53 The second-generation Daoist
philosopher Zhuangzi speaks of a fish that is thousands of miles long, and a bird
with a wingspan:
many thousand miles across . . . When it rises in the air, its wings are like
the clouds of Heaven. When the seas move, this bird too travels to the south
darkness, the darkness known as the Pool of Heaven.54
It is noteworthy how, in the correlative whole of the cosmos, the idea of heaven
does not negate a sense of vast horizontality. Yes, the character translated heaven,
tian1, is also the word for sky. But in the rimless correlative cosmos, the expanse
is so enormous that, somehow, the pool of heaven is somewhere in the south.
The point is that Chinese cultural ideology did not place an emphasis on the vertical
to the extent which, in Europe for instance, drove the erection of the Gothic
cathedrals.
Even the vertical Buddhist pagoda, which has Indian rather than indigenous
Chinese roots, is often subordinated to the horizontality of the courtyard precinct.
I am thinking, for instance, of the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an, a Buddhist tower
that dates from the Tang dynasty but which is situated in an essentially Confucian-
derived horizontal courtyard compound. The Confucian aspect of the courtyard
residence will be explained in the next chapter. Suffice it here to say that, in the
Chinese case, Confucianism significantly focused on the here and now rather than
on the hereafter. Such an outlook implicitly assumes horizontal bearings. The
outlook was perhaps reified very early in Chinese ideas, when the Zhou house
overthrew the earlier Shang in 1046 BCE. The Shang worshipped shang4 di4,
or Lord on High, emphasizing the vertical. But at the ascension of the Zhou, the
Lord on High was replaced by tian, heaven. The Zhou claimed that it was
the Mandate of Heaven, tian1 ming4, that endorsed their conquest of the Shang,
a rationale that has been invoked for every subsequent dynastic change. And the
Zhou conception of tian is not exclusively vertical. While it does have volition, it
is much more naturalistic—read: horizontal—than the English translation of the
word suggests. At any rate, Confucius, active some five centuries later, after the
Zhou house had eroded into many competing states, always held the Zhou as an
idealized time. So by the time of Confucius, we have this: “Confucius said . . .
‘Does heaven (tian) say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things
are produced. Does heaven (tian) say anything?’ ”55 The horizontal is embedded in
the notion of the seasons in their courses and “all things (that are) produced”;
Confucius probably had agricultural production in mind.
One might say that the explosion of vertical high-rises in contemporary China
violates this historically horizontal aspect of Chinese culture, and Chinese
architecture (see Figure 5.10). Of course the vertical aspect is a new develop-
ment, and later chapters will address this. But there remains a unique sense of
horizontality in many Chinese cities even while high-rises erupt everywhere; anyone
who has lived in these urban centers can attest to it. Resisting the vertical dimension
are large-scale stretches of horizontal urban space: broad arterial roads, enormous
traffic circles, and long distances between transit stops that must be traversed on
foot. All seem to diminish the scale of pedestrians, the numbers of which often
seem countless even as they are somehow lost in broad and impersonal urban vistas
(see Figure 1.9). Indeed, the sheer verticality of residential and commercial towers
is often muted by the fact that you are usually seeing them, somehow, from a
distance; they often seem faraway. Between those towers and you is always a gaggle
of horizontality.
34 Past
FIGURE 1.9 An arterial road in Wuhan (Louyu Road): the horizontal breadth of the
urban space dwarfs people and even tall buildings.
Notes
1 This translation of Wang Xizhi “Orchid Pavilion” is by Wai-Lim Yip, editor and
translator, Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1997), 135. Used by permission of Duke University Press.
2 Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Derk Bodde (New York: Free
Press, 1966), 25 (vol. 1, 40 in Chinese edition).
3 Cited by John Minford in his introduction to Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese
Studio (Penguin Books, 2006), xxvi.
4 Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval, The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in
China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 241.
5 Ma Yansong, Shanshui City (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 48.
6 A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing,
1989), 350.
7 Wing Tsit-Chan: “wu-wei . . . is not meant literally ‘inactivity’ but rather ‘taking no action
that is contrary to Nature’—in other words, letting Nature take its own course.”
See “The Natural Way of Lao Tzu,” in Wing Tsit-Chan, A Source Book in Chinese
Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), 136.
8 Confucius, Analects 2.4, translated by Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing, 2003), 9.
9 Graham, op. cit., 350.
10 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, eds. Jean Hillier and Emma
Rooksby (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 43.
11 Ibid., 44.
12 Here, for instance, is Theodor Adorno: “The polarity of subject and object may well
appear to be an undialectical structure in which all dialectics takes place. But the two
concepts are resultant categories of reflection, formulas for an irreconcilability; they are
not positive, primary states of fact . . . They are neither an ultimate duality nor a screen
hiding ultimate unity. They constitute one another as much as—by virtue of such
constitution—they depart from each other.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans.
E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 174.
13 Demosthenes in Aristogeit, section 17. Cited in G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of
Life (New York: Collier, 1961), 56.
14 Book of Changes, Appendix III, The Great Appendix, trans. James Legge. www.sacred-
texts.com/ich/icap3–1.htm, accessed October 8, 2014.
15 Summaries of these methods can be commonly found on the Internet. A good example
can be found in Alfred Huang, “Introducing Simpler Ways to Consult,” in The Complete
I Ching (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions), www.overdrive.com/media/509534/the-
complete-i-ching-10th-anniversary-edition, ebook, 8–10.
16 “The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang, and through the blending
of the qi they achieve harmony.” Wing-Tsit Chan, trans. and ed., Tao-te Ching 42 in
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), 160.
17 Ole Bruun, Fengshui in China: Geomantic Divination Between State Orthodoxy and Popular
Religion (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 129.
18 Mencius 2A:2, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1970), 77.
19 Bruun, Fengshui in China, op. cit.
20 Kathy Gao, “More Chinese Turning to Feng Shui Masters to Name their Children,” in
South China Post, July 12, 2015. www.scmp.com/news/china/money-wealth/article/
1838226/more-chinese-parents-turning-shui-masters-name-their. Accessed July 30,
2015.
21 Jeffery Meyer addresses this in “Feng-shui of the Chinese City,” History of Religions 18:2
(November, 1978), 149: “There are simply too many variables of site and cosmic-
geomantic factors to allow for consistent analysis.”
22 Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth-
Century Carpenter’s Manual “Lu Ban Jing” (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 55–61.
23 Author interview with Bao Pao in MAD Beijing’s offices, December 3, 2015.
24 Chou Tun-I (Zhou Dunyi), “An Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate,”
in Wing Tsit-Chan, A Source Book, op. cit., 463.
25 See A.C. Graham, op. cit., 351.
26 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690] (London: J.M. Dent, 1994),
71.
27 A.C. Graham, op. cit., 351.
28 Limin Zheng, CCTV.com English, “Liang Sicheng – Father of Modern Chinese Archi-
tecture”, http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/journeysintime/20110617/105582.shtml, accessed
March 7, 2015.
29 Liang Sicheng, “Why Study Chinese Architecture?,” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 73:1 (March, 2014), 8–11. The article first appeared in Bulletin of the Society
for Research in Chinese Architecture [Zhongguo yingzao wueshe buikan] 7: 1 (October, 1944).
The English version is translated from the Chinese by Yan Wencheng.
30 Dao De Jing 32, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1963), 91.
31 Dao De Jing 37, ibid., 96.
32 Confucius, Analects 12.11, in Chan, op. cit., 130.
33 Donald Munro, Images of Human Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton University Press, 1988),
50.
34 Fung Yu-lan, “Neo-Taoism: The Sentimentalists” in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
(New York: The Free Press, 1966), 231–240.
35 Wing Tsit-Chan, “Kuo Hsiang’s Commentary on the Chuang Tzu” in Chan, op. cit.,
327.
36 Andrew Boyd, Chinese Architecture and Town Planning 1500 BC–1911 AD (London: Alec
Tiranti, 1962), 113.
37 Liu Shilong, “The Imaginary Garden of Liu Shilong,” trans. Stanislaus Fung, Terra Nova
2:4, 16.
38 See Wu Liangyong, Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999),
16–29.
39 Wu Liangyong’s and Nancy Steinhardt’s books are cited earlier. Also Heng Chye Kiang,
Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes,
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, May 1999.
36 Past
40 Mary Bockover, “The Concept of Emotion Revisited: A Critical Synthesis of Western

and Confucian Thought,” in Emotions in Asian Thought, eds. Joel Marks and Roger Ames
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 161–180.
41 Chad Hansen, Language and Logic in Ancient China (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1983).
42 See Bao Zhi-Ming, “Book Review: Language and Logic in Ancient China,” Philosophy
East and West 35:2 (April, 1985), 203–212.
43 Wai-Lim Yip, Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–5.
44 Zuangzi, “Grasping the Purpose of Life” in The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer
(Penguin, 1996), 161.
45 Wang Yanming, “Inquiry on the Great Learning” in Wing-Tsit Chan, op. cit., 659.
46 See Kenneth K.S. Chen’s treatment of this in his The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism
(Princeton University Press, 1973), 14–60.
47 Donald Munro, Images of Human Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton University Press, 1988),
54.
48 K.C. Chang, “Clans, Towns, and the Political Landscape” in Art, Myth and Ritual: The
Path of Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1983), 9–32.
49 Mencius 3A:3.
50 Wu Liangyong, op. cit., 66–69.
51 Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
52 See A.C. Graham, op. cit., 64–70.
53 See Livia Kohn, Taoist Mystical Philosophy: Scripture of Western Ascension (New York, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1991).
54 “Wandering where you will” in The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer with
Elizabeth Breuilly (Penguin, 1996), 1.
55 Analects 17.19, in Chan, op. cit., 47.
2
HOMES FOR PLATO AND
CONFUCIUS
We begin our learning in chains, and facing the back wall of a cave. The cave
opening is behind us, and so faraway that a fire has to be lit for light. Not knowing
any better, we think the shadows cast on the wall are true knowledge. But we are
eventually helped by more enlightened persons, let us say philosophers. They loosen
our chains, turn us around, and gradually lead us stumbling towards the light at
the cave opening. Along the way, we think that what we see at any point is true
knowledge, only to realize at later stages that what we held dear in earlier stages
were ephemera. Our hope is that, eventually, we will make it all the way out of
the cave, where the light of true knowledge will finally bathe us.1
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that “the safest general
characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series
of footnotes to Plato.”2 Nowhere is this more apt than in how Plato’s allegory of
the cave serves as a synopsis for stylistic change in Greco-European architecture.
For the evolution of Western architectural styles over the centuries, the cave allegory
is not only insightful; it is prophetic.
In this chapter I propose a twofold theory. I first offer an explanation for why
architectural styles in the Greco-European tradition constantly change. I take
philosophical principles in Plato’s cave allegory and apply them to Western
architectural-historical developments. The upshot is that stylistic changes in Western
architecture reflect a series of stages in the progression out of the cave, in which
each style represents the latest version of true knowledge—for a while. Second, I
show how Chinese architecture underwent far less stylistic change thanks to
principles embedded in the correlative nature of Chinese ideas. I also show how
Confucian social roles corresponded with, of all things, architectural framing
members as relational entities indexed to social hierarchies. If Confucian social relations
were enduring, why would we ever change architectural members if they were
indexed to that social structure?
38 Past
So by the title of this chapter I mean to suggest that, while Western philosophical
ideas may all be footnotes to Plato, Western architecture through the centuries
may well be a series of homes for which Plato was the client. The irony should
not be missed. As many who have experienced architect–client relations know,
architects often foist their own ideals upon their clients rather than pliantly design
to their clients’ wishes. But Plato was no garden-variety client. My point is that
even as architects trained in the Greco-European tradition march to the beat of
their own muses, the muse of all muses was Plato. This is because architects in this
tradition pursue ideals. They would not be architects otherwise; they would merely
be draftspeople. The ideals architects design by are informed by Plato’s theory of
the forms. But those ideals change, informed by Plato’s theory of the cave.
In contrast, homes for Confucius all tend to look alike over time. Nancy
Steinhardt puts it this way:
anyone who looks at Chinese architecture cannot but notice how much of
it looks like so much of the rest. Any new kind of construction would be
more noticeable in the homogenous Chinese-built environment than in any
country of Europe, for example, where architecture distinct to every period
from the Classical Age of Greece onward stood or had been copied in its cities.3
Steinhardt is addressing the dilemma early twentieth-century Chinese architects

faced after returning to China from their educations abroad: how to design new
buildings, now influenced by Western ideals, and place them into urban contexts
in which everything “looks like so much of the rest?” In this chapter, I give a
philosophical account for this sameness, on the one hand, and for those distinctly
different period styles that “had been copied,” on the other.
Let me first define what I mean by style. Style refers to the shared visual attributes
of a collection of objects such that they can be said to bear a “family resemblance”
to one another. In this sense, to echo Steinhardt, the architecture of the classical
period exhibits a style, as does that of the early Christian era, or that of the Gothic,
Renaissance, or modernist eras, and so on. Indeed, the reason we have these arbitrary
period labels, complete with arbitrary dates, is thanks to these family resemblances.
When family resemblances change in the bulk of the works of a given period, we
say that a different style has emerged. Now, my position throughout this book is
that the visual attributes of architectural forms—their styles—are always material
manifestations of the ideologies of the cultures that produce them. To cite from
Bourdieu’s theory of habitus (italics his):
the best example of the unity of human behavior of a person, but also of a
group, is lifestyle—again the word style—of the “petty bourgeoisie,” which
may be recognized in their manner (a synonym of style, or in German, Art)
of speaking (characterized by hypercorrectness in their language), of saving
(they are thrifty in their manner), of loving (they have very few children),
and so on. For in these things which are apparently independent, and that
Homes for Plato and Confucius 39
common sociology does not study together, fertility, artistic tastes, political
opinions and so on, there is some unity.4
I cite Bourdieu to underline that architectural manifestations of a culture’s overall

outlook are merely one of many ways that culture’s “disposition” (his word) is
expressed in style. These ways include speaking, saving, loving, artistic tastes, political
opinions, and the like. The cultural disposition itself is informed and shaped by
underlying philosophical convictions. So as changes in the styles of Greco-European
architecture are considered, we are necessarily considering shifts in ideological
convictions through the centuries. In contrast, the latter half of this chapter discerns
little stylistic change in Chinese architecture because of its roots in the correlative
nature of Chinese philosophy. Indeed, we note that there are no period labels for
Chinese architecture as it moves through the centuries. We simply identify Chinese
works by the name of the ruling houses during whose rule they appear: Han, Tang,
Song, Ming, and Qing. It was not until the modern era—again, let’s assign 1840
as the starting date—that styles began to proliferate in China. And this was due to
the fraying of the correlative view, thanks to the importation of ideas from the
West. Those ideas created a tipping point, and Chinese culture began to consider
how to exit its version of Plato’s cave.
Architecture through Plato’s Cave

There are five ways the cave allegory resonate with Greco-European architecture
and its progression through styles over time. The first two are general parallels
between the cave and the project of architecture in this tradition. The third and
fourth have had lasting impact in Western ideas far beyond architecture; indeed,
their impact on architecture is merely one manifestation of their overall hegemony.
The fifth is what I call the driveshaft for the entire allegory: dialectic. Dialectic is
what propels architectural styles forward conceptually and temporally. Dialectic is
at the root of architectural theory in the West, and this very term indicates change
over time. I now address these five in order.
First, all ten books of the Republic outline Plato’s philosophy of the ideal state:
what are its enabling foundations; how is it constituted; who are its leaders and
how do we cultivate new ones? This is the first resonance between Plato’s cave
and architecture because, in this tradition, buildings are meant to express a culture’s
political idealism in material form. We see it in the first theoretical treatise that
has come down to us, Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. Addressed to the emperor
Augustus, it amounts to a theory for how architecture can embody the greatness
of the Roman polity:
when I saw that you were giving your attention not only to the welfare of
society in general and to the establishment of public order, but also to the
providing of public buildings intended for utilitarian purposes, so that not
only should the State have been enriched with provinces by your means,
40 Past
but that the greatness of its power might likewise be attended with
distinguished authority in its public buildings, I thought that I ought to take
the first opportunity to lay before you my writings on this theme.5
Coupling a political ideal with the visual attributes of buildings is a recurring

meme in this tradition. In the early Middle Ages, the ideal Benedictine community
found expression in the Plan of St. Gall.6 During the Renaissance, Leon Battista
Alberti theorized that beautiful architecture can repel an enemy from attacking a
community.7 In the eighteenth century Marc Antoine Laugier called for a return
to the Greek Orders to give visual identity to the emerging French Enlightenment.
In the nineteenth century, Augustus Welby Pugin insisted that the Gothic style
would give England a national identity. And then there is the so-called International
Style of the twentieth century. The premise of an international style comes from
modernism’s utopian moorings, to wit finally, we can have community on a
worldwide scale, thanks to the efficiency of the Machine. Hence we should open
our eyes, said Le Corbusier, and design houses and cities as machines for living
in.8 Even in deconstructivist architecture we see, if not ideals, the imperative to
invoke an abstract larger condition of which physical architecture is an empirical
manifestation. Consider this from Bernard Tschumi:
Madness serves as a constant point of reference throughout the Urban Parc

de la Villette because it seems to illustrate a characteristic situation at the
end of the twentieth century—that of disjunctions and dissociation between
use, form and societal values . . . the contemporary city and its many parts
(here at La Villette) are made to correspond with the dissociated elements
of schizophrenia.9
FIGURE 2.1 A “folie” at the Parc de la Villette, Paris, by Bernard Tschumi.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I explain how the loss of ideality in contemporary works

such as Parc de la Villette plays a significant role in their visual attributes. I am
referring to poststructuralism’s rejection of any transcendental sources for
determinations of meaning. But suffice it to say that one challenge for ideological
systems that reject ideality is how the rejection itself can become an ideal;10 Platonism
is difficult to discard. You can detect it in a wide array of twentieth-century theories.
New Urbanist thinkers such as Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk hold that mixed-use
neighborhoods will result in the revival of the ideals of good community (see below).
Perhaps at the opposite extreme, Rowan Moore argues how “desire shapes space
and space shapes desires” in the formal excesses of Dubai: artificial archipelagos,
interior ski slopes, super graphics of speed boats and women “spread many stories
high across buildings . . . (and) rising over it all as a guarantor of intent is the slender
spiral of the Burj Dubai.”11 All of these examples link ideals of various kinds to
architectural forms.
This, then, is the first connection between the history of Western architecture
and Plato’s Republic: progress out of the cave is about progress towards the ideal
community, and at every stage of the way that ideal community must be expressed
by the visual attributes of buildings. The idea is so taken-for-granted that it hardly
registers a blip in our thinking. But in light of the lack of such an impetus in the
Chinese case, we get a sense of just how curious this assumption is. We come to
see that ideals expressed in physical forms are not necessary facts of nature, but
perhaps only some sort of penchant to allegorize our existence, perhaps to build
stage sets for it.
How is all of this exiting out of the cave to be achieved? By education. This
is the second resonance between the cave allegory and architecture. After Socrates
outlines the allegory itself, there ensues a protracted conversation about the subjects
of learning needed for the trek towards light. The subjects outlined are arguably
various departments of an architectural education. At least, they embody the spirit
of such an education in that the goal is to produce well-rounded individuals who
can think in wholes, towards the end of elevating the health, safety, and welfare
of the community. For prior to any of the categories of learning, Socrates’s
concern is “unity,” a term he seems to equate to “the idea of the good,” or to
“pure thought with a view to truth itself.”12 It is in pursuit of this unity that the
subjects of learning are enumerated. The first is number, or arithmetic: “the qualities
of number appear to lead to the apprehension of truth.”13 The second subject easily
follows: “geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent.”14 After geometry the
conversation becomes more complex, because Socrates wants to remind Glaucon,
his interlocutor, that it is not just about this or that subject, but about apprehending
unity. In this vein Socrates rejects Glaucon’s suggestion of astronomy as the third
subject of learning because he is after something more foundational: the study of
the third dimension, which is solids.15 Once we have solids, we have bodies, and
then we have astronomy for the study of the movements of these bodies.16 From
here Socrates moves to music, and to the enabling basis of music: harmony.
Harmony, in turn, is “useful for the investigation of the beautiful and the good.”
42 Past
And what is more . . . I take it that if the investigation of all these studies
goes far enough to bring out their community and kinship with one another,
and to infer their affinities, then to busy ourselves with them contributes to
our desired end.17
Greek architecture and sculpture of the Classical Age materializes this formulation
for harmony by Socrates. This harmony was realized not just by mere mathematical
proportions, as is often taught. The Enlightenment theorist J.N.L. Durand was
correct when he offered that, behold, upon measuring a human foot, it did not have
a 1 : 6 proportion to the body18 (this so that he could reject classical proportions
for the functionalist paradigm of the machine). But Durand quite missed the point.
The Greek notion of symmetria, understood as proportional harmony expressed in
physical form, had moorings in moral determinations: the beautiful is experienced
when the proportional distribution of the object in front of me resonates with the
sense of moral proportions within me.19 In contrast, Durand’s understanding of Greek
proportions was a utilitarian one: his was merely a matter of arithmetic fractions.
But on Socrates’s view, number, the first subject of learning, must culminate in all
of the subjects, evoking their “community and kinship.” Community and kinship
were beyond Durand’s grasp of the Greek view of proportion; at least, they were
not useful to his functionalist agenda. It is clear that Socrates had something much
more than mere arithmetic fractions in mind. In fact he uses material expressions
of beauty precisely as examples that fall short of a larger vision of beauty:
we must use the blazonry of the heavens as patterns to aid in the study of
those realities, just as one would do who changed upon diagrams drawn with
special care and elaboration by Daedalus or some other craftsman or painter.
For anyone acquainted with geometry who saw such designs would admit
the beauty of the workmanship, but would think it absurd to examine them
seriously in the expectation of finding in them the absolute truth.20
Here we see the restlessness of life in the cave: we push ever forward towards
superior expressions of absolute truth in physical forms, all the while failing to do
so. And this process is led by those who have been trained in Socrates’s
interdisciplinary array of subjects of learning. Some three centuries after Plato, here
are Vitruvius’s recommendations for the education of architects (the echoes of
Socrates’s prescriptions for training leaders of the ideal community are clear):
Let him be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know
much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand
music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists,
and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.21
Thus the Greco-European tradition trains architects by giving them an instinct

for holism, informed by ideals and enabled by facility in a wide range of disciplinary
bodies of knowledge. Architects are thus not unlike the philosopher-guardians of

the cave allegory, who, upon achieving enlightenment through education, return
to help other exiting prisoners. The instruments of their service are buildings they
design, buildings which manifest the communal ideal (albeit of the moment), that
educate the masses in the way that they should go towards a brighter future. Hence
the aforementioned penchant of architects to pursue ideals rather than to merely
enable their clients’ functional needs. True to their Platonic mission, architects sense
a calling to help their clients, to educate them to be better citizens. To cite a
contemporary example, here again is Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk: “By providing a full
range of housing types and workplaces . . . the bonds of an authentic community
are formed . . . By promoting suitable civic buildings, democratic initiatives are
encouraged and the organic evolution of society is secured.”22 This claim that
physical forms can of themselves conduce democratic initiatives and the organic
evolution of society has a long pedigree. It is the pedigree of the cave.
It leads to the third resonance between the cave allegory and architecture. The
trek out of the cave is an upwards one. Again, Plato’s Socrates:
I think that this study certainly compels the soul to look upward and leads
it away from things here to those higher things. . . . For I, for my part, am
unable to suppose that any other study turns the soul’s gaze upward than
that which deals with being and the invisible.23
And here is Vitruvius:
I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without
having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by
the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the
holy ground of architecture.24
The upward impetus derives from a low view of materiality. Indeed, in Plato,
materiality resists true truth. The Good is transcendent; physicality resists the Good.
Thus the goal of wisdom, to quote from the Symposium, entails progressing from
the beauty of the body, to the beauty of the mind, to the beauty of civic institutions,
to the beauty of divisions of knowledge, and finally to “beauty’s very self, unsullied,
unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint.”25 In Phaedrus, the human soul is likened
to a pair of winged steeds controlled by a charioteer. They aim to reach the very
“summit of the arch that supports the heavens.”26 But one of the two steeds is
wayward, and resists the ascent. In other words, the soul strives upwards for the
true light, but its residence in the physical body hampers it. Hence the human soul
is a thing very difficult to control.27 The tenth book of the Republic is decisive on
this point: anything in this material world is merely a copy of its immaterial ideal.28
Not only do we know beds because they are reflections of the ideal bed; we know
justice because it reflects the ideal of justice. And in the Timaeus, profoundly influ-
ential in the European Middle Ages, time itself is a “moving image of eternity.”29
44 Past
Recall again Steinhardt’s point about Western cities: “where architecture distinct
to every period from the Classical Age of Greece onward . . . had been copied.”30
What are they copies of? They are copies of ideals, and those ideals are from above.
Consider the words of Suger of St. Denis (1081–1155 CE), who transformed his
humble abbey church into the first Gothic cathedral (Figure 2.2a). An inscription
over the west façade doors states that the interior light “should brighten the minds,
so that they may travel . . . to the True Light of which Christ is the door.”31 By
Suger’s time of course, Plato’s light had been thoroughly Christianized. But this
is the point. I said earlier that the first two resonances are general parallels between
the cave and architectural matters. But this third one, the idea that true truth resides
above while what we have here are mere copies of it, is a Platonic notion that has
had far more impact than just in matters architectural. It profoundly affected early
Christian theology and, from there, European civilization. The theologian Hans
Boersma has coined a term for this: the Platonist-Christian synthesis, and he argues
that it became the basis for the sacramental practices of the Church, in which the
materiality of this world is seen to be infused with the presence of heaven.32 Because
of the hegemony of the Church in cultural ideas at least through the Renaissance,
this sacramental mentality actively shaped European art and architecture.
By the Renaissance, the ideal became more humanistic. Nevertheless, it still
came from above; it remained immaterial, and materiality is still elevated when it
expresses it. Here is the Platonist philosopher-priest Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499):
What, then, is the beauty of the body? Activity, vivacity, and a certain grace
shining in the body because of the infusion of its own idea. This kind of
glow does not descend into matter until the matter has been carefully
prepared.33
The humanist tone of Ficino contrasts with the sacerdotal tone of Suger. The
holy light of St. Denis is exchanged for “activity, vivacity, and a certain grace shining
in the body.” But one thing remains clear: that vivacity comes from a glow that
descends into matter. (See for example Figure 2.2b.)
The drive to bring the ideal “down to earth” in material form continued to
evolve as cultural ideals evolved. Consider domes. The Ptolemaic model of the
solar system placed the earth at the center. This rhymed with the received teaching
of the Church at the time. The concentric circles of the bodies revolving around
the earth (the sun included) fit nicely with the pure geometries of circle and square.
Leonardo da Vinci captured this static view of beauty in his Vitruvian Man, and a
host of Renaissance works reflected this stasis in round forms, from Bramante’s
Tempietto to the dome of St. Peter’s. But on risk of heresy, not to mention on
risk of their lives, Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543 CE) and Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642 CE) posited that the earth was not the center of the universe but was
one of many heavenly bodies rotating about the sun. In other words, the earth
actually moved. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630 CE) scandalized even further by
suggesting that that movement was not circular but ovoid, having multiple foci.
FIGURE 2.2a Interior of St. Denis Cathedral, Paris.
FIGURE 2.2b St. Teresa in Ecstasy, 1650, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in the Santa Maria
della Vittoria, Rome.
46 Past
Architecture followed suit: ovoid domes emerged as the stasis of Renaissance

geometry gave way to the dynamic forms of the baroque period. The oval dome
of Francesco Borromini’s S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome (1634) is
representative. The small but sensually charged space expands and contracts, thanks
to the undulating walls. Above, the dome, illuminated by light from windows barely
visible from the ground, creates a space of psychological power (Figure 2.3).
FIGURE 2.3 S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 1634, by Francesco Borromini, Rome.
At every stage, change in ideals motivated change in the physical attributes of

the objects of material culture. Here is a view of beauty at the time of the Futurist
theorist Fillippo Marinetti, dating from 1909:
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty—the beauty of speed. A racing car with its bonnet draped with
exhaust-pipes like fire-breathing serpents—a roaring racing car, rattling along
like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the winged victory of
Samothrace.34
Perhaps we cannot say that this ideal of beauty is from above. But Marinetti’s
logic betrays vestiges of the material–immaterial framework: the material needs to
express something that is, in its ideal state, immaterial. The material object must
then be a re-presentation of the ideal. Thus:
The fourth way architecture through the ages resonates with the cave allegory
is in the notion of imitation (mimesis). The very shadows cast on the back wall,
and so the many reflections of truth along the way, are all essentially copies of reality
rather than reality itself. Recall again the keen attention etched on the face of the
artist in Figure 1.2. Copying is not an easy job. But neither is mimesis merely
about copying. If the reflections in the cave are ephemeral, they are nevertheless
reflections of true light, or at least of truth in the direction of light. Hence their
clarity at every stage is the result of the best strivings for higher things. The Greek
view of mimesis, in short, was never a matter of making (what we would call)
mimeographs of things. The Greeks did not know what mimeographs were. Their
notion of imitation was imbued with moral overtones. This was why, for Plato,
imitation was worrisome, because it demeans the ideal it represents, and hence
might stir the masses in false ways. But in Aristotle’s Poetics, humans are the most
imitative of beings and derive great pleasure from imitation.35 What is more, on
Aristotle’s view, the poetic art reports not merely what has happened, but what
may happen.36 So, far from mere copy, there is a projective element in the Greek
view of mimesis. In this sense it is forward looking: mimesis in art is about imitating
ideals so the masses can have visual guides for the cultivation of moral rectitude.
At least until the postmodernism of the mid-twentieth century, architecture of every
period not only strove to express the highest in communal values in physical forms,
as such it functioned as a guide for moral ideals moving forward. The problem, as
we have seen, is that ideals themselves change as cultural priorities change. Hence
architectural styles change to follow suit.
The dialectic between materiality, on the one hand, and having to reflect the
latest ideals, on the other, is what I earlier called the driveshaft of the exodus out
of the cave; dialectic is the fifth resonance between Plato’s allegory and the history
of Greco-European architecture:
This . . . is the very law which dialectic recites, the strain which it executes,
of which, though it belongs to the intelligible, we may see an imitation in
the progress of the faculty of vision, as we described its endeavor to look at
living things themselves and the stars themselves and finally at the very sun.
In like manner, when anyone by dialectic attempts through discourse of reason
and apart from all perceptions of sense to find his way to the very essence
of each thing and does not desist till he apprehends by thought itself the
nature of the good in itself, he arrives at the limit of the intelligible.37
Aristotle goes on to say that the dialectician is “the man who is able to exact
an account of the essence of each thing,”38 and calls “dialectic above all other studies
to be as it were the coping stone.”39 The dictionary defines dialectic as “discussion
and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation; specifically:
the Socratic techniques of exposing false beliefs and eliciting truth.”40 On
architectural terms, dialectic is the driving force of theory, and hence of its
proliferation. The remarkable thing about Greco-European architectural history is
48 Past
the sheer volume of theories it has produced; all of them, arguably, over what
buildings should look like. The proliferation of words about what buildings should
look like is so abundant that commentators have noted that words and buildings
seem to go hand-in-hand. I am thinking of Adrian Forty’s Words and Buildings,41
or of Paul-Alan Johnson’s survey of architectural theory, in which he notes that
words about buildings abound so much that contemporary theory in this domain
can be regarded as “just talk.”42
The driveshaft of dialectic also linearizes the experience of time. Time is marked
by progress, and progress is marked by styles that change as we come into ever clearer
understandings (read: copies) of truth—via dialectic. The philosopher who
formalized this linear-progressive view for art and architecture is G.W.F. Hegel.
Hegel posited the communal consciousness as a Spirit (geist) that progresses
through time through a dialectical process by which contingent traits are rooted
out as it strives towards universal freedom. Throughout this process the communal
Spirit leaves in its wake material “shapes” of itself. These shapes are the objects
of material culture. “Spirit now brings itself explicitly into the product it creates,
and becomes an artist instead of an artificer.”43 Hegel’s philosophy was profoundly
influential: Heinrich Wolfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Principles of
Art History (1915) are essentially Hegelian analyses for how periods of art morph
from one to the next. Hegelianism is also behind the utopian ethos of modernism;
Seigfried Giedion, Nicholas Pevsner, Le Corbusier, and many lesser voices, all wrote
with a sense that their time was something of a culmination of communal Spirit.
Le Corbusier: “A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit.”44 But alas, as
of this writing, when cyber networks now inform the visual attributes of architecture
(see Chapter 7), the looks of the “new spirit” of modernism have only proven
to be yesterday’s ephemera.
Confucius and the Solar System

In contrast to proliferating words, here is the Daoist philosopher Zuangzi: “Since
all things are one, what room is there for speech?”45 In China, it was not only the
Daoists who were skeptical about language. The Song dynasty philosopher Zhu
Xi’s Reflections on Things at Hand, an anthology of neo-Confucian wisdom issued
in 1176 CE, says this:
Generally speaking, if one can achieve learning so naturally as to be beyond

words, he will really achieve it in a natural way. If one schematizes or makes
deliberate arrangements, he does not achieve it in a natural way at all.46
The antagonism against “schematizing” derives from the unreflective axiom that
the Eye/I is, or ought to be, one with the operations of the larger cosmos, which
produces life wordlessly; see Figure 1.3a. By the time of Reflections on Things at
Hand, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian understandings of “nature” were well on
their way to being admixed together in the neo-Confucian renaissance of the Song
dynasty (960–1279 CE). This was true even though the project of Zhu Xi and his
neo-Confucian predecessors during the Song dynasty was to refute the pervasive
Buddhist outlook, which had (according to them) degraded Chinese culture. But
their pro-Confucian stance belied the fact that they themselves were products of
a way of life that had imbibed Buddhist ideas for centuries. In fact, the necessity
of the prefix “neo” to distinguish it from earlier Confucianism is largely thanks to
the need to recognize the incorporation of Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics into
the earlier version.
The Song era, then, was a time of synthesis; it was a time when strands of ideas
and practices from past centuries were consolidated into a renaissance of Chinese
culture. It was during the Song era that movable press emerged, Chinese porcelain
reached new heights in refinement, regional cultures flourished, paper money
enabled widespread economic development, and the emperors themselves were
often artists. In this cultural and intellectual ferment, it is not surprising that Reflections
on Things at Hand emerged as a compendium of neo-Confucian thought. Actually,
the abundance of neo-Confucian writings as compared with the relative brevity
of earlier Confucian works is itself a testament to Buddhist influence. Carsun Chung
has summarized the voluminous Buddhist sutras from India that had been translated
into Chinese by the Song period.47 This verbiage must have influenced Confucian
thinkers to work out their own thoughts in words as well, even as those words
gave Confucianism a metaphysical dimension informed by Buddhist ideas.
Another compendium to emerge in twelfth-century Song China is the Manual
of Building Standards, or the Ying2 Zao4 Fa3 Shi4 (hereafter Yingzao fashi), first
published in 1103. Generally held to be the first systematic Chinese architectural
treatise, it has been compared with Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, which
appeared about a millennium earlier. But this comparison is only because both
occupy the “first” position in their respective traditions. The difference between
them is pronounced. As Li Shiqiao has noted, in Vitruvius the technical aspects
are in service to “beauty and intellectual enlightenment,” while the Yingzao fashi
codified the forms and colors of imperial palaces “in accordance with hierarchy
and power.”48 Put another way, the Vitruvian project forever situated architec-
ture in the realm of philosophical speculation, as we just saw. But the Yingzao
fashi formalized Chinese imperial construction as an expression of social hierarchy.
This explains why the Chinese literati class never embraced architecture as a
contemplative pursuit: building was always regarded as the purview of workmen.
Of course, in the West, at least since the Renaissance, class divisions have also
persisted between the architect-as-visionary and the laborer-builder. But there is
not a view that the creation of built environments themselves can be regulated
merely by a “manual of building standards.” This would be something like using
the International Building Code as the theoretical basis for architectural design, an
idea that would repulse architects educated in Platonist-Vitruvian idealism. At any
rate, that the Yingzhao fashi appeared during the Song period does not mean this
social-hierarchical aspect of architecture was novel to its time. Quite the contrary:
Qinhua Guo has argued that the Yingzao fashi’s compendium nature reflected
50 Past
centuries of construction practices embedded in the Chinese artisan guild system.

The codification during the Song period was largely due to that period’s need for
clearer guidelines for managing the growth of building practices and expenses.49
In what follows I argue that the social philosophy embedded in the Yingzhao fashi
is a key reason why Chinese architectural style did not change much over the
centuries.
Chapter 1 showed how family, jia1, was woven into the very fabric of the cosmos
in the Chinese correlative view. To grasp how this ethics-laden view regulated
not only social structure but also architectural structure, we need to consider how
this moral-cosmic fabric was, as it were, “divvied up” in this outlook. On the one
hand, the individual Eye/I is coterminous with the percolations of the larger cosmos
(Figure 1.3a), and this participation can be reflected in the fluid elements of the
system, as exhibited in the vitalistic operations of feng1 shui3. We saw this in Chapter
1. But on the other hand, each individual Eye/I is also allotted a piece of this
cosmic fabric, called fen4, or portion. The fen aspect, or role aspect, of each person
is more relatable to the fixed dimensions of the Eye/I’s position in the correlative
mix. From the early days of Confucianism, social roles were cast in five basic
relational pairs: ruler–subject, husband–wife, father–son, older sibling–younger
sibling, and friend–friend.50 These roles, and hence these pairs, were fixed. The
Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zheng4 ming2) held that if each
person cultivated his or her role by social protocols (li3) successfully, not only society,
but also nature, prospers. For example, when the itinerant Confucius briefly held
an official position as chief justice of the state of Lu, the Han dynasty historian
Sima Qian recorded this:
After three months of his administration vendors of lamb and pork stopped
raising their prices, men and women walked on different sides of the street,
no one picked up anything lost on the road, and strangers coming to the
city did not have to look for the officers in charge for everyone made them
welcome.51
Produce abounds, and virtuous conduct is exhibited by all, all because of the
superior man’s proper conduct (li). In contrast, as recently as 1976, when a large
earthquake in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan killed nearly 250,000 people,
it “contributed to a popular sense that the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had been
withdrawn from the ruling party.”52 That was the year the disastrous Cultural
Revolution came to an end. Later that same year, Mao Zedong himself died. It is
what I call moral causality, that is, the view that correct or incorrect moral
discharge of one’s role impacts the roles of those in relation to that person, and
also impacts natural processes because all roles are working parts of the organic
cosmic fabric. On this view, if the role happens to be ruler of the empire, the
consequences of proper or improper li can be enormous, as, perhaps, in the case
of Mao. Jonathan Spence lists the typical li activities of the Qing emperor Kangxi,
whose long rule extended from 1661 to 1772 CE:
Much of his life had to be spent in ritual activity: at court audiences in the
Forbidden City, offering prayers at the Temple of Heaven, attending lectures
by court scholars on the Confucian Classics, performing sacrifices to his
Manchu ancestors in the shamanic shrines . . . Almost every detail of his life
emphasized his uniqueness and superiority to lesser mortals: he alone faced
the south, while his ministers faced the north.53
This was not empty pomp; it was the rectification of Kangxi’s fen as the Son
of Heaven so that society would prosper. By the time of Kangxi in the Qing dynasty,
Zhu Xi’s teaching from the Song was well established:
Tien-fen [contentment with one’s lot] means the Principle of Nature. If the
father, the son, the ruler, or the minister is contented and at ease with his
lot or function, how could he be selfish? Therefore he would not commit
an act of unrighteousness or kill an innocent person even if to acquire an
empire.54
Again, the fen-portion-role conception allows for an otherwise constantly

dynamic cosmos (e.g. the yin-yang oscillation of all things, the Five Elements
morphing one to the next) to nevertheless have a stability anchored in a network
of unchanging social-relational structures. Donald Munro has pointed out that, by
the time of the Song dynasty, as part of the metaphysical turn in a Buddhism-
informed neo-Confucianism, not only were human beings part of a vastly extended
family structure, even inanimate things were conceived of as being apportioned
their fen, and hence also participating in an essentially familial-social cosmic system.
To explain how this worked at the philosophical level, Munro connects two terms
pronounced alike (li3) but meaning different things. One is li-ritual, or social
protocols of behavior; this is the li of the early Confucianism we have been
considering up to now. The other is li3-principle. The Song dynasty neo-Confucian
philosophers elevated li-principle, which earlier had been used in Daoist and
Buddhist texts, to the highest level of importance in their thinking. Zhu Xi and
his school taught that li-principle is one, but also in all things. The beautiful
image Zhu Xi gives is that of moonlight and its many reflections on a body of
water. It is not that the moon is “actual” and that its reflected light in many “pieces”
is somehow ephemeral. Both the one and the many are actual. Once we
comprehend li-principle in all things—by seriously investigating them—we will
come into enlightenment on how to conduct ourselves in all affairs (that is, in li-
ritual). Li-principle gave neo-Confucianism a metaphysical dimension that earlier
Confucianism lacked. Thus the fen of social roles became hardwired, as it were,
in a metaphysical sense to the proper li-principle for each role. To misbehave in
your role was not only wrong by social convention; it was fundamentally unnatural.
Munro puts it this way: “Once we comprehend li (principle) in all things by seriously
investigating them, we will come into enlightenment on how to conduct ourselves
in all affairs with the ritual protocols (li-ritual) stressed by early Confucianism.”55
52 Past
How does all this relate to architecture? In the Yinzhao fashi, fen is also the term
used to designate measures for architectural framing members in an overall
construction system indexed to social hierarchy. Thus fen connects neo-Confucian
social philosophy with architecture, in that both are conceived of as systems com-
posed of apportioned units relationally ordered. There are eight classes of framing
units, each called a cai2. These eight classes vary in scale indexed to the social rank
of the occupant of a building. The proportions of each cai unit are 15 fen high by
10 fen wide. It is this 15 : 10 proportion that remains the same; the actual cai-fen
sizes for each class measure differently based on social class. The largest class measures
9″ high by 6″ wide, while the smallest class is 4.5″ high and 3″ wide.56 So buildings
occupied by the emperor were constructed in the largest cai-fen class, and structures
housing lesser officials were based on smaller cai-fen classifications. The result is
that all structures tended to look alike—recall Steinhardt’s point; they were just in
different scales. Architectural size was a mirror of social rank, a visible manifestation
of Confucian social order. A ruler is a ruler; a minister is a minister; a father is a
father. Each is a fen, but each fen is different in “size” in the sense of rank, and this
is reflected in architectural scale.
Thus the term fen for both social structure and architectural structure opens
a window into how the correlative mind conceived of component parts working
within a single correlative reality. And there was little leeway to alter from this
paradigm. The third-generation Confucian philosopher Xunzi (312 BCE–230
BCE)—I will address him in much more depth in Chapter 6—had this to say: “To
order the provinces and communities, fix the regulations pertaining to dwellings
. . . making sure that no one dares to manufacture sculptured or ornamented
decorations privately at home—these are the duties of the director of artisans.”57
So much for (what we in the West would call) creativity.
Cai also has social grounding. In the Chinese language, a person’s natural ability
or talent is also termed cai2. In the architectural use of the cai pictograph, the wood
radical is added but the pronunciation of both is the same. And if a person is
especially gifted, his or her talent (or genius) is called tian1 cai2, that is, ability from
heaven. This is the same tian as the tian of the Mandate of Heaven (tian1 ming4)
so prevalent in Chinese ideas since the Zhou dynasty. Again, a revealing economy
of terms between social and architectural apportionments: both are cai and fen.
Now, the cai unit is the regulating measure for the size of the dou3 gong4 brackets
(see Figure 2.4) that distinctively transfer roof loading onto the post-and-lintel
structure of the Chinese timber-frame. These dou gong brackets are composed of
layers of mortise and tenon members stacked orthogonally on each other. By this
means the cai-fen regulating measures permeate throughout the body of the building.
The Yingzao Fashi: “According to the height and depth of the buildings, the length
of the detail components, the shape of the curve pitched roof, the rules of using
square or circle, every situation has its cai-fen rules.”58
To reflect: If cai is derived from heaven and fen is indexed to li-principle that
is in all things, then participating members, whether social or architectural, are
imbued with relational responsibility to maintain a cosmic orderliness, departure

from which would be not only incorrect, but also unnatural. This way of seeing
would not encourage an ongoing dialectical search for ideals to be expressed in
ever-changing material forms. It would not generate a notion of “progress,” by
which tomorrow is anticipated as an improvement upon today, exemplified by
novel physical objects. Finally, moral conduct would not be guided by ideals
embodied in building forms; rather, building forms themselves conform to a
cosmic system of fixed fen apportionments indexed to unchanging social roles.
I want now to enlarge on one particular aspect of this social-cosmic appor-
tionment system. Simply put, this system is composed of units. I suggest that it
encourages a unitized way of thinking, the architectural manifestations of which
are a reflection of a more general tendency to see reality as “cut up” into ethical-
moral units. Chad Hansen’s linguistic theory of the Chinese language, alluded to
in Chapter 1, applies here. Hansen holds that the ancient Chinese made no systematic
reference to an abstract realm, but rather divided reality into “stuffs.” Chinese nouns,
then, designate these stuffs by what he calls mass nouns, for example, “horse” or
“white.” (Adjective stuffs can “interpenetrate” noun stuffs; e.g. “a white horse.”)
In the Platonic approach “horseness” emits from the ideal of horse, an abstract
entity. Physical horses are such because they all share some attribute of this horse
ideal. This propensity to see an individual thing as participating in its ideal “form”
results in the pursuit of a transcendental realm where all ideals reside, as we saw
in the progress out of the cave. But in the Chinese case, on Hansen’s view, all
horses are simply distributed parts of horse-stuff.
FIGURE 2.4 Dou gong brackets in the Forbidden City, Beijing.

54 Past
We can characterize Chinese semantic theories as a view that the world is

a collection of overlapping and interpenetrating stuffs or substances . . . The
mind is not regarded as an internal picturing mechanism which represents
the individual objects in the world, but as a faculty that discriminates the
boundaries of the substances or stuffs referred to by names.59
FIGURE 2.5 Structures in the courtyard of the Hall of the Cultivation of Character,
Forbidden City, Beijing.
In the Chinese correlative view, the mind is not an “internal picturing

mechanism,” as would be the case in Figure 1.3b. Instead, the Eye/I is itself a fen
that is able to distinguish its place within the correlative whole (Figure 1.3a) by
seeing other pieces of the whole as divided into their respective fen. The entire
system, in turn, is permeated with li-principle, and investigation of its distribution
in things leads to enlightenment on how each fen conducts itself in correct li-rituals.
We toggle again to architecture: One of the striking features of historic Chinese
architecture is that it exists as an assemblage of distinct rectilinear units arranged
in spatial relation to each other, most usually in the courtyard type, or si4 he2 yuan4
(hereafter siheyuan). I call these units Chinese Architectural Units, or CAU.
Following Hansen, these CAUs can be seen as architecture-stuffs. In his Pictorial
History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Sicheng documents the varieties of these CAUs.60
For our purposes, it is noteworthy how these CAUs maintain their individual
boundaries even for units so close to each other that their overhanging eaves almost
touch (Figure 2.5). It seems to not occur to this view that a much more “functional”
solution would be to integrate all adjacent CAUs into a single plan under one roof,
something we see in abundance in Roman plans, and ever afterwards in the West.
Indeed, part of the pleasure of Western architectural design comes in arranging
spaces in ever novel “adjacencies” abutting each other. But in the Chinese case,
CAUs are inviolate unitized forms. I suggest this is because CAUs are again seen
as equivalents to the inviolate social roles they house. These CAUs are distributed
through the space of the social-natural world as stuffs that nevertheless have their
respective fen, and therefore must conform to the Confucian social order of
individual roles relating to other individual roles.
In a siheyuan, the north–south axis usually locates the main occupants, whether
they be the parents in a residential siheyuan, or the grandparents, or the altar to
ancestors. This main location features a prominent CAU. In the Forbidden City,
which is a siheyuan writ large, the north–south axis locates the six CAUs that house
the three public and three private functions of the emperor. The first of these, the
Hall of Supreme Harmony, exemplifies this centrality. All of the surrounding
courtyards and their respective CAUs “orbit” it. The Forbidden City plan, then,
is the architectural manifestation of this well-known statement from Confucius’s
Analects: “A ruler who governs his state by virtue is like the north polar star, which
remains in its place while all the other stars revolve around it.”61 (See Figure 2.6.)
This again is moral causality, and here we see how this Confucian social solar
system is expressed in architecture. The operative term is de2, usually translated
virtue. Early Chinese schools shared this term because they all discerned moral
virtue as a power resident in the cosmos. The question is how to access it. The
Daoists held it was by spontaneity and escape from social conventions. For Daoists,
the spontaneity of the superior man ushered forth the de to rule. For Confucius
and his followers, de was achieved through li-ritual. The point is that this de was
not some sort of poetic way of describing the emperor’s winsomeness. The force
of de, on this view, was actual. It is no different, say, than the force of gravity in
terms of its visceral impact, at least on this view. So subservient stars revolving
56 Past
around the center star as a picture of social order, to the correlative mind, is
something like what we might call a scientific formula; at least, it was a rational
formula. Again, Confucius: “The character of the ruler is like wind and that of
the people is like grass. In whatever direction the wind blows, the grass always
bends.”62
The Forbidden City in Beijing, home to the Ming and Qing emperors, is an
architectural personification of these philosophical principles. The Hall of Supreme
Harmony, the first of six major halls along the south–north axis of this enormous
compound (three public and three for private royal use), is not only the architectural
To Coal Hill
NORTH on axis
(ultimately to the Gate of
Earthly Peace)
Theatre
Imperial Gardens
Concubines residences
Hall of Terrestrial Tranquility
Hall of Heavenly-Earthly Union
Hall of Heavenly Purity

Private (north) /
Public (south)
Hall of Preserving Harmony
Hall of Central Harmony
Hall of Supreme Harmony
Workshops
Princes’ quarters
Imperial Storehouses
To Tian An Men Gate and
Tian An Men Square
SOUTH on axis
FIGURE 2.6 Plan of the Forbidden City. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, along with
the other major halls on the south–north axis, is the center of the
physical-moral universe around which all of Confucian society orbits,
held together by the emperor’s moral virtue (de).
FIGURE 2.7 The Hall of Supreme Harmony.
center of the empire; it is also the moral center. Around this center “orbit” all of
the subservient halls and courtyards of the Forbidden City and, beyond them, the
walled city and, beyond that, the outer reaches of the empire.
The moral suasion inherent in early Confucianism did not weaken in the
Song renaissance; if anything the opposite was true, as the construction of the
Forbidden City during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE) amply attests. Song
neo-Confucianism energized the belief in moral causality by giving early
Confucianism’s emphasis on social protocol a metaphysical depth. Again, proper
behavior, li-ritual, was not mere social convention, but rather the enlightened
expression of the li-principle of the cosmos. As principle is lived forth, the virtuous
power (de) of the cosmos is transmitted hierarchically from the emperor throughout
the natural–social order of things. When all of this is accomplished, perhaps the
most important Confucian construct is realized: ren2, or humane benevolence. On
Confucian terms, when an entire society expresses ren, the oneness of nature and
culture needs no further demonstration.
Here I have attempted to show that Confucian social ideology found expression
in the material members and forms of imperial Chinese architecture. It goes some
way towards explaining why architectural style remained largely unchanged. This
was because built forms were a reification of the philosophical principles upon
which Chinese culture was based. Those principles outlined a view of human society
as composed of apportionments of the cosmos, and the task of learning and
achieving cultural sophistication was to live forth one’s apportionment well, in fixed
relations to other social apportionments. The Song period, and Song architecture,
may have been the apogee of this cultural outlook, at least in terms of its expression
in the arts.
By the Qing dynasty (1644–1911 CE), it is true that the cai-fen measuring system
was no longer used in Chinese construction. A new manual, the Gong1 Cheng2
58 Past
Zuo4 Fa3 Zili (Structural Regulations), guided building efforts. Much of what we
see in the Forbidden City is of this vintage. Liang Sicheng points out that the Qing
regulations resulted in CAUs that look more rigid: the entasis of the columns are
gone, the lilt of the roof is less pronounced and the roofs are pitched higher, and
the dou gong brackets are smaller and more abundant,63 making some dou gong look
more like appliqué than structure. But importantly, the Qing regulations still indexed
the size of building members (and hence the size of buildings) to social classes.
Thus the fundamental linkage between social and architectural structure remained.
And social structure, viewed as a natural production to be cultivated and maintained,
did not change.
Notes
1 Plato, Republic VII, 514–521. All references and marginal citations from Plato are from
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the
Letters, Fourteenth Edition (Princeton University Press, 1989). All citations of Plato in
this chapter are from this source.
2 He continues: “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have
doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered
through them.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press,
1978), 39.
3 Nancy S. Steinhardt, “Chinese Architecture on the Eve of the Beaux-Arts” in Jeffrey
W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-
Arts (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 4.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, eds. Jean Hillier and Emma
Rooksby (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 44–45.
5 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, I.Preface.2, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan, 1914,
www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/29239-h.htm, accessed October 31, 2014.
6 “the Plan might be fairly characterized as a two-dimensional meditation on the ideal early
medieval monastic community, created at a time when monasticism was one of the
dominant forms of political, economic, and cultural power in Europe.” “Carolingian
Culture at Reichenau & St. Gall.” www.stgallplan.org/en/index_plan.html. Accessed
November 10, 2014.
7 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Book VI, I.2, trans. Joseph
Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 156.
8 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover
Publications, 1986), 4, 95, 107.
9 Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette (Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 16–17.
10 For instance, as James Bohman points out in his overview of critical theory, an out-
look that informs much of contemporary theory-making, its critique of ideology
“if generalized threatens to undermine the critical stance itself as one more ideology.”
James Bohman, “Critical Theory,” in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/,
March 8, 2005. Accessed May 17, 2015.
11 Rowan Moore, “Desire Shapes Space, and Space Shapes Desires,” in Why We Build (New
York: HarperCollins, 2013), 1–31.
12 Republic VII, see 526a-e.
13 Republic VII, 525b.
15 Republic VII, 528d.
16 Republic VII, 528e-529a.
17 Republic VII, 530e-531c.
18 “First of all, a man’s foot is not one-sixth of his height. What is more, in all Greek
buildings, the proportions of Doric columns are endlessly varied . . . the exact proportion
of six to one is not found in a single case.” J.N.L. Durand, “Introduction,” in Precis of
the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications Program,
2000), 81.
19 See Pollitt’s treatment of symmetria; in brief, he traces it to the penchant of the
Pythagorean school to see number as distributed through all things as the element that
produces eu, or “the perfect”: “it may be that in expressing this quality through harmony
of parts in sculptural form, he [the sculptor Polykleitos] was attempting to give expression
to an ideal conception of human nature, a divine pattern which expressed the essential
nature of man.” J.J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge University
Press, 1972), 107.
20 Republic VII, 529e.
21 Vitruvius, op. cit., I.1.
22 Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, quoted in Daralice Boles, “Reordering the Suburbs,” Progressive
Architecture 5 (1989): 78–91.
23 Republic VII, 529a,b.
24 Ibid., 1.11.
25 Symposium, 211c-e.
26 Phaedrus, 247b.
27 Phaedrus, 246a-b.
28 Republic X, 596–598.
29 Timaeus, 37d.
30 Nancy S. Steinhardt, “Chinese Architecture on the Eve of the Beaux-Arts,” in Jeffrey
W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-
Arts (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 4.
31 Suger, “De Administratione, XXVII” in Erwin Panofsky, trans., Abbot Suger on the Abbey
Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton University Press, 1973), 47–49.
32 Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011),
see 33–39.
33 This statement is from Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, V, vi, 1469. I cite it
from Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York:
Macmillan, 1966), 119.
34 This statement is the fourth of 11 propositions from Marinetti’s Foundation Manifesto of
1909. Cited in Reynor Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London:
The Architectural Press, 1960), 103.
35 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b, 5–20.
36 Aristotle, Poetics, Part IX at 1451a, 35 to 1451b, 5.
37 Republic VII, 532a.
39 Republic VII, 534e.
40 “Dialectic” www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dialectic. Accessed November 11,
2014.
41 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames
& Hudson, 2000), 11–18.
42 Paul-Alan Johnson, The Theory of Architecture: Concepts, Themes & Practices (New York:
John Wiley, 1994), xvii.
43 Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977),
580.
44 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., 6.
45 Cited from “The Chuang Tzu” in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy,
op. cit., 186.
46 The statement comes from Ch’eng Hao, a predecessor of Chu Hsi in neo-Confucianism.
Chu Hsi and Lu Tsu-Ch’ien, Reflections on Things at Hand, Chapter 2, Section 41,
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op. cit., 58–59. The Chinese title jin-4 si-1 lu4 has been translated in other ways; a
summary and analysis of the various approaches at translation is provided by Philip J.
Ivanhoe, “Reflections on the Chin-ssu lu,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 108:2
(April–June, 1988), 269–275.
47 Carsun Chung, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT:
College and University Press, 1963), 80–83.
48 Li Shiqiao, “Reconstituting the Chinese Building Tradition: The Yingzao Fashi in the
Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians 62:4 (December,
2003), 470–489 (471).
49 Qinghua Guo, “Twelfth-Century Chinese Building Manual,” Architectural History 41,
1–13 (3–4).
50 “Doctrine of the Mean,” Section 20, in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese
Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1973), 105.
51 Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Chien), “Confucius,” in Records of the Historian, trans. Yang Hsien-
yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1979), 8.
52 US Library of Congress, “The Cultural Revolution, 1966–76,” http://countrystudies.us/
china/28.htm. Accessed October 2, 2014.
53 Jonathan Spence, Emperor of China: Self Portrait of K’ang-Hsi (New York: Random House,
1988), xii.
54 Reflections, op. cit., 54.
55 Donald Munro, “The Family and the Stream” in Images of Human Nature: A Song Portrait
(Princeton University Press, 1988), 53.
Century Carpenter’s Manual “Lu Ban Jing” (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 27.
57 Xunzi (Hsun Tzu), “The Regulations of a King,” in Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu,
and Han Fei Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964),
49 in the Hsun Tzu section.
58 Yinzao Fashi, Jie Li, Haiyan Wang, 67. Translation courtesy of XiXi He.
59 Chad Hansen, Language and Logic in Ancient China (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1983), 30.
60 Liang Sicheng, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, ed. Wilma Fairbank (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985), 11.
61 Analects 2.1, in Wing Tsit-Chan trans., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton
University Press, 1963), 22.
62 Analects 12.19, in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 40.
63 Liang Sicheng, op. cit., 14–21.
3
AN AESTHETICS OF CHINESE
BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
In the last decades of the twentieth century, Taiwan became rich. The boom in
computer technology coupled with the tradition of family-owned business
networking, and the general emergence of Asia as an economic power, combined
to improve standards of living. Farmland owned for generations by families of
humble means all of a sudden became valuable. Figure 3.1 shows an oversized three-
story residence in southern Taiwan. The new home is built of masonry and polished
stone; the older structure in front was a previous structure belonging to the family
who now resides in the new building. When the road was built, its trajectory literally
sliced through the property. Thus the old structure became a literal “section” of
what traditional Chinese timber-frame construction looks like. But why leave the
shack partially standing, sliced through like a loaf of stale bread? And surrounding
it, a cluttered cornucopia: miscellaneous farm detritus, pigs and chickens squealing
and clucking away, fence posts without the fencing. The mansion itself is sited
peculiarly amidst a gaggle of other buildings, sticking up over the sea of stuff like
the conning tower of a misplaced submarine.
Consider now a proposal for Gangxia Village in the burgeoning city of
Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong (Figure 3.2). The proposal is by Urbanus
Architects, based in Shenzhen and Beijing. Rural migration to urban centers is
one of the major challenges facing the Chinese government today. As the economy
boomed in the last years of the twentieth century, vast numbers of rural people
moved to the cities, bringing about intense housing shortages (not to mention the
decay of rural towns; more on this later). The Villages in Cities (VIC) phenom-
enon is one in which entire urban sectors serve as destinations for migrant workers,
making those locales villages in the sense of their singular identity, or because they
once actually were villages but have been engulfed by expanding urban foot-
prints. Hence villages in cities.1 Residents in these locales, previously rural folks
themselves, offer housing and other services at affordable rates. It awakens the
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FIGURE 3.1 A new mansion in southern Taiwan.
entrepreneurial spirit, spurring additions to residences as rooms to let. The VIC

quickly teems with small stores and shops and service enterprises. VICs become
their own subcultures amidst congested housing. Here is Urbanus’s design strategy
for Gangxia Village:
By partial demolition, infilling, stitching and adding public facilities on

the roof, this dynamic rehabilitation will fix the existing dense buildings
and fragmented public spaces . . . This renovation strategy will also
dramatically improve the commercial, housing, transportation and com-
munity facilities in order to gain the highest possible increase in property
value, and simultaneously maintain the intricate social structure of the
existing neighbourhood.2
In the above examples, existing infrastructure is not totally demolished and

removed for the new. Rather, some existing conditions are precisely not
demolished, so that they can be “infilled and stitched” into the new. At least this
is Urbanus’s wording for the Gangxia Village design. In the Taiwan example, any
infilling and stitching seem to result from serendipity rather than from intentionality.
Whatever else might be said of both examples, the impact on the senses is one of
busyness, perhaps a lack of orthogonality, certainly a sense of clutter. It prompts
contemplation as to why this is so, particularly because clutteredness seems to be
An Aesthetics of Chinese Built Environments 63
a trait of Chinese urban environments. Here, for instance, is Dieter Hassenpflug’s

description of an urban sidewalk in China:
Sometimes sidewalks are transformed into a workbench for repairing bikes,

motorcycles, TV sets, and shoes; or a workshop for assembling doors and
windows; or a storefront advertising decorative pet fish, songbirds, and cats;
where dumplings, jaozi, and pancakes are prepared and sold; and a mobile
barber shop is opened.3
See, for instance, Figure 3.3. Hassenpflug’s philosophical bearings are structuralist,
and I will address Chinese environments through the lens of structuralism in Chapter
5. Structuralism assumes experiences of cultural meaning are derived from a
vocabulary of components—and different cultural systems have different
vocabularies that create meaning. For example, Hassenpflug warns that we cannot
read the cacophony of public spaces in China as public per se, because “for the
Chinese, the space beyond the spaces enclosed by walls and fences in which they
live and work and teach and learn . . . is still primarily a ‘non-space,’ or ‘non-
place.’ ”4 In other words, public/private may be meaningful values that are not in
the Chinese perceptual framework in quite the same way as they are in European
frameworks. This accords with points made in Chapter 1 regarding the lack of
upkeep of spaces outside of walled family units: If spaces outside walled compounds
are non-places, why maintain their appearance? In this chapter I look to indigenous
philosophical ideas as the enabling vocabularies, as it were, for the rationale of the
FIGURE 3.2 Design proposal for Gangxia Village, Shenzhen, by Urbanus Architects.
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FIGURE 3.3 A very typical scene of cluttered street life in urban Wuhan.
aesthetics of Chinese urban environments. I look to Daoist, Buddhist, and

Confucian roots for the state of affairs typified by the hubbub, for instance, of
Chinese sidewalks. First, I need to define what I mean by aesthetics.
Aesthetics in Relation to the Eye/I

The word aesthetics, insofar as it defines a field of philosophical inquiry, is itself a
term with a long pedigree in Greco-European ideas. This is another way of saying
that, while we can use the word as an entrée into the Chinese case, we should
define how we are using it for our case. The term comes from the Greek aesthesis,
having to do with perceptions of the senses. In his Aesthetica, the German
philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762 CE) elevated this term by making
it a science, specifically the study of how the senses determine judgements of beauty.
This capacity, called taste, would occupy the efforts of a long line of thinkers in
the eighteenth century, both in England as well as on the European Continent,
culminating in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). The concern for taste
was timely. The emerging Industrial Revolution, along with the scientific-
technological point of view that enabled it, produced more wealth and increased
time for leisure. This brought about the enjoyment of fine art, a class of objects
the desirability of which is precisely due to their lack of utility, while instantiating
moral refinements. Today aesthetics is an active division of any well-rounded
academic philosophy department. Among the questions asked: What is art? How
does art relate to morals? How does art relate to culture? How do institutions confer
art status upon objects? Also: What is beauty? This last question is what connects
aesthetics as Baumgarten and subsequent thinkers regarded it, with what Wladyslaw
Tatarkiewicz has called “the Great Theory of Beauty.”5 In other words, without
ever knowing they were contributing to a discourse called aesthetics per se,
thinkers since Plato have expounded on the nature of beauty. Tatarkiewicz’s essay
identifies many permutations of it, but the Great Theory, that is, the structural
spine of all of these approaches—and even those who eventually rejected the Great
Theory rejected the spine of it—is clear. Beauty consists of “that which pleases
when it is perceived” by means of “lustre and fit proportion.”6 The Greeks held
that form rightly distributed by number (read: proportion) yields the beautiful. The
Christian Middle Ages, drawing from Plato and Plotinus, added the dimension of
inner illumination, as we saw in Ficino in Chapter 2.
I suggest that beauty in the Greco-European tradition is indexed to the removed
position of the Eye/I as illustrated in Figure 1.3b. From this position, beauty is
present—that is, it is perceived—if a given presentation is arranged according to
“fit proportion.” Again, our artist in Figure 1.2 was quite on edge because the
quality of his outcome depended on the accurate numerical representation of what
he perceived through his grid. That the Eye/I is situated differently in the Chinese
tradition (Figure 1.3a) provides a point of departure for how sensed experiences
in this tradition can be understood. For example, while beauty does play a role in
Chinese literary criticism,7,8 Chinese philosophy proper was not as preoccupied
with it as was its Greco-European counterpart. The Daodejing uses mei3 (beauty)
eight times, but in reference to other considerations. In his translation of the Daoist
text, Jonathan Star translates mei enjoy, elevate, delighting in.9 In the Confucian
Analects, mei appears fourteen times. It is also adjectival. James Legge variously
translates it “a natural ease is to be prized” (1.12), a pretty smile (3.8), the admirable
qualities of the Duke of Zhou (11.8), and so on.10
By an aesthetics of Chinese built environments, then, I mean the totality of
physical features that are presented to the senses when in midst of such an
environment: the pigs squealing, the fence posts without fencing, the whole
bricolage of stuff. I am not after theorizations of beauty. Or put another way, to
grasp indigenous receptions of environments in China, we should set aside any long-
held prerequisites for beauty indexed to particular “just so” distributions of
materiality. Aesthetics in the sense I am using has to do with the immediate sensual
impact of any presented array. In this regard, I am after a phenomenology of Chinese
built environments. I address phenomenology more in the next chapter. Suffice it
here to say that it refers to sense experience prior to any documentation of such
experience, say by words or photographs, or by other conventions of propositional
construction: postcards, travelogues, certainly not equations, nor even—let me be
clear—theoretical contemplations such as what I propose below. This immediacy
of pre-propositional experience led Martin Heidegger to say that we are thrown
into any environment we are immediately in.11
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In what follows, I first elevate clutter to a technical term for Chinese built
environments. Out of this, I consider how early Chinese thinking associated culture
with pattern, compared with an emphasis on proportion in early Greek ideas. I consider
how time plays a role; specifically, how there may be a spatial aspect to perceptions
of time that stress, not progress, but accrual. Finally, if all things are composed of
qi4, I consider how this may impact environmental settings from an aesthetical
point of view.
An Aesthetics of Clutter
Clutter is not used with any intent to be pejorative. I am after a word that denotes
a state of affairs teeming with activity, so much so that, perhaps at least to a Western
eye, many parts seem out of place, not obviously related one to the next. Such an
environment tends to feel more like it is in process, rather than having already
arrived at a settled state, with all of the pieces in place according to some tacitly
assumed ruling rationale. This is what I mean by clutter. My aim is to suggest
philosophical constructs in the Chinese correlative view that may be enabling factors
contributing to expressions of clutter in this sense.
One challenge in reading Chinese philosophy is managing the need to grasp
the totality as a coherent system. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the tension between
fluidity and fixity is ongoing. Nothing is permanently fixed, as it were, by Cartesian
coordinates. Again: the Great Ultimate (tai4 ji2) issues forth the yin1 yang2. The
eight trigrams come from it. Somehow the Five Elements (wu3 xing2) also come
from it. The four cardinal directions of the compass are guarded by four animals
(si4 shou4). The Chinese compass is divided into 24 sub-directions, the positions
of which change annually. As Jeffrey Meyer has pointed out, for feng1 shui3
prognostications, “there are simply too many variables of site and cosmic-geomantic
factors to allow for consistent analysis.”12
My point is that this way of thinking, in which many factors fluidly move—
and in which it is perfectly “natural” for them to do so—corresponds with and
gives shape to empirical assemblages of built environments. Those environments
tend to be cluttered.
But once we get “beyond” Chinese cosmology, don’t things settle down? We
did note the five social relations in Confucianism in Chapter 1; these are fixed. In
fact, Chapter 2 looked to this social stasis as grounds for stylistic stasis in architecture.
But in reading Chinese philosophy in general, one never gets the sense of a
monolithic, quantitatively stable (in the sense of measurable) universe. The stability
is at best qualitative. This qualitative framework allows for wiggle room, which
is to say it allows for clutter. For instance, as we saw on Chapter 1, it is not clear
how the values of the Confucian family structure, motivated by ren2 (humane
benevolence) and enacted by li3 (ritual), extend beyond the family unit. This was
the basis of our argument for porosity, that is, for unevenness in attention to
environmental orderliness: order inside the courtyard residence tends not to extend
to the outside (see Figure 1.6). Dahua Cui and Huang Deyuan have even called
the inability of Confucianism to bridge between private and public morality a

weakness of the philosophy.13
Aside from Confucian protocols and their nonuniform impact on environmental
quality, there is the Daoist penchant to just let things be. In the Daodejing, the
ruler is one who speaks little and leaves no trace, so “when all is finished, the people
say, ‘it happened by itself ’ ” (zi4 ran2, meaning spontaneous, or natural, or nature
itself).14 Or again: “Speak little, hold your own nature” (zi ran).15 The value of
holding one’s own nature has deep roots in early Chinese ideas. The Yangist school,
active during the Spring and Autumn periods (770–481 BCE), taught that to engage
in any external affairs at all—statecraft, for instance—is to depart from Heaven’s
purpose for one’s life, which is to keep one’s “original nature.”16 To say no more,
this can give philosophical depth to letting things be. But of course the goal was
not environmental clutter; clutter is perhaps a collateral outcome of such a view.
The real prize was wu2 wei3, often translated actionless action. The ruler who speaks
little and leaves no trace is also one who “acts without action” (wu wei).17 But “act
without action” doesn’t quite capture the point behind wu wei, which has more
to do with “letting nature flow through you.” A Western reader might be attracted
to this idea of natural spontaneity. But another outcome of letting nature flow
through you is not doing anything if it doesn’t. A commitment to wu wei is also
a rejection of all preplanned, hence conventionalized, activities. Thus the Daoists
thrilled in belittling Confucianism’s endless li social rituals. The Daoist approach
to social relations, if there is such a thing, is simply to let things be so as to assure
that all developments are actionlessly natural. The operational outcome can well be
this description of Daoist community relations: “Though neighbouring commun-
ities overlook one another and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs can be
heard, yet the people there may grow old and die without ever visiting one
another.”18 Something resonates between this passage and the scene in Figure 3.1:
the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, the squealing of pigs, the fence posts
without fencing . . . just let all of it be.
Another possible basis for clutter comes from Chinese Buddhism. Buddhism
entered China via India during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). Initially it was
regarded as a strange foreign teaching. But Buddhism took root in China largely
because Daoism acted as a kind of host in which Buddhist principles were able to
incubate. By the time of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) Buddhism had transformed
Chinese civilization. Buddhism not only gave indigenous Chinese philosophy a
systematic metaphysics, it gave it a pictorial metaphysics. Consider Wing Tsit-Chan’s
description of the tenets of Tian1 Tai2 Buddhism:
In the realm of . . . the phenomenal world, there are ten realms: Buddhas,
bodhisattvas, buddhas-for-themselves, direct disciples of the Buddha, heavenly
beings, spirits, human beings, departed beings, beasts, and depraved men.
Since each of these involves the others, there are thus one hundred realms.
Each of these in turn possesses the Ten Characters of Thusness: character,
nature, substance, energy, activity, cause, condition, effect, retribution, and
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being ultimate from beginning to end, that is, each is “thus-caused,” “thus-
natured,” and so forth. Each of these consists of living beings, of space,
and of aggregates (matter, sensation, thought, disposition, and conscious-
ness). The result is three thousand worlds, which is the totality of manifested
reality.19
This is not a metaphysics defined by axioms and doctrines as much as one defined
pictorially. And the picture is cluttered. But the most significant Chinese Buddhist
school is Chan2, better known by its Japanese name, Zen. Chan differs from Indian
Buddhism in that it is all inclusive: it taught that all possess Buddha nature (“the
three Bodies of the Buddha nature are within you”).20 And rather than a rigid
regimen of meditation, Chan taught sudden enlightenment can come to anyone,
at any time: “the principle of sudden enlightenment means to understand without
going through gradual steps, for understanding is natural. Sudden enlightenment
means that one’s mind is empty and void from the beginning. It means that the
mind has no attachment.”21
By the nature of the case, sudden enlightenment is not something one can make
happen. In fact Chan’s insistence on living an ordinary life, while resonating with
Daoism’s own stress on spontaneity, often made its utterances earthier: “In
Buddhism no effort is necessary. All one has to do is to do nothing except to move
his bowels, urinate, put on his clothing, eat his meals, and lie down if he is tired.”22
And if all this regularity still doesn’t bring enlightenment, there is gong1 an4, the
explicit practice of the non sequitur raised to the level of philosophy: “The Master
ascended the hall. A monk asked, ‘What is the basic idea of the Law preached by
the Buddha?’ . . . and the Master beat him . . .”23 This logically incongruous
behaviour rids the student of any expectation that comprehension comes via organized
conceptual systems or efforts. Such an agenda for living would probably not conduce
organizing all empirical things just so. The chances are higher that things would
be cluttered.
Yet another theme in Chinese philosophy contributing to clutter in built
environments can perhaps be called “the angle of totality.” In his The Arts of China,
Michael Sullivan recounts how a Song dynasty art critic, Shen Gua, lambasted the
painter Li Cheng for depicting the eaves of a pagoda “as a person on the level
ground is able to see the beams and rafters . . . this is absurd.” In other words, the
eaves were painted in (what the West would call) proper perspective. What Li
should have done, according to Shen Gua, was to paint the eaves “from the angle
of totality to behold the part.”24 What does the angle to totality mean? Well it
certainly is not exemplified by the tense artist in Figure 1.2, who is tense because
he wants to reduce all vantage points down to one. The tradition of art education
in the West, not to mention the much larger cultural outlooks based on this
perspectival reception of the cosmos, rarely recognizes that this is a reduction of
experiential possibilities.
But the Eye/I in Figure 1.3a floats freely in the “soup” of the cosmos. It is not
anchored to any single vantage point and it does not seek to perceive the cosmos
from any such point. An entry written by the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo
Emerson actually captures this state of affairs:
There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity . . .

which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed
by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.25
If we set aside the references to the Universal Being and to God, this transparent
eyeball is much like the Eye/I in Figure 1.3a. It sees all; at least, it values
multiperspectivalism in simultaneity. This is the angle of totality. Such an untethered
angle allows for many moving parts, and many parts occupying one space, without
conflict. Consider this exchange between the leading neo-Confucian philosopher
Zhu Xi and a student:
QUESTION: In distinguishing between the four terms Heaven and the Decree,
the Nature and Law, would it be correct to say that in the term Heaven the
reference is to its attribute of self-existence, that in the term Decree the
reference is to its all-pervading activity and immanence in the universe, that
in the term Nature the reference is to that complete substance by which all
things have their life, and that in the term Law the reference is to the fact
that every event and thing has each its own rule of existence; but that taking
them together, Heaven is Law, the Decree is the Nature, and the Nature is Law?
ANSWER: Yes, but in the present day it is maintained that the term Heaven
has no reference to the Ruler, whereas, in my view, this cannot be left out
of account.26
The meanings of the technical terms all seem interchangeable . . . and by the way,
make sure the Ruler is in the mix as well. I am suggesting that the correlative bent
of the Chinese philosophical outlook accommodates clutter on the empirical surface
of things because it allows for multiple shifts of meaning at the conceptual depths of
things. It depends on your point of view. And there are many points of view. The
angle of totality does not favour propositionally fixed terms; therefore it does not
demand arrangements of things tidied up, just so, in a geometricized world.
The Culture of Pattern

Confucius said, after young men cultivate respect for parents at home, and for
elders when away from home, if they have any energy to spare, they should
“devote it to learning the cultural arts (wen2).”27 In the notes to his translation of
the Analects, Wing Tsit-Chan says wen means “ ‘patterns,’ here extended to mean
the embodiment of culture and the moral law (Tao).”28 Although scholarship on
wen is ongoing, that the crosshatch nature of the pictograph itself (see Appendix)
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suggests “pattern” is well established.29 Liu Xie’s fifth-century treatise The Literary
Mind and the Carving of Dragons opens with this: “Wen, or pattern, is a very great
power indeed. It is born together with heaven and earth.”30 By the Song dynasty,
it was a matter of social standing for a poet or artist to be called a wen2 ren2, or a
person of culture. The connection is clear: a wen ren is someone who is totally
natural in his execution of an artistic task. This is because the patterns of nature
are transmitted in the production:
The Western landscape painter may try to imitate the appearance of nature
and even capture the spirit in it, but he has not normally been concerned
with reproducing the rhythm of nature in his own hand. In contrast, the
wen [ren] was far less interested in attaining a likeness of nature than in capturing
nature’s rhythm and thereby perhaps capturing the spirit not only of nature,
but of life itself.31
Here any division between nature and culture is transcended in accordance with
the wen ideal. In this light we understand the prized story of the Tang dynasty
painter Wu Daozi who, when assured of the emperor’s approval of a landscape he
had painted, simply stepped into the painting to be “seen upon the earth no more.”32
This view of culture as coterminous with nature contrasts with standard divisions
between nature and culture in Greco-European ideas. Herbert Simon’s influential
Sciences of the Artificial comes to mind. Simon posits that anything human presence
touches renders that thing artificial (in the sense of artifactual), and hence separates
it from nature.33 I will return to Simon in Chapter 4. At a more popular level, in
his Second Nature, Michael Pollan argues that every square inch of the planet has
now been affected by human activity, so it is not possible to go back to a pure
“wilderness ethic.”34 Much earlier than either Simon or Pollan is Aristotle, who
held that art “completes what nature cannot bring to a finish” (italics added), meaning
that art must pass through human rationality in order to be.35 Barring human agency,
nature remains in the raw; it is no accident that our word artifice, or artefact, is
rooted in the word art.
As noted earlier in reference to the Great Theory, a key rationale in the Greco-
European aesthetics is proportion, or certain numerical constancies that transcend
the flux of the empirical world. The task of art is to express those constancies in
empirical forms. Plato:
All things require to be compared, not only with one another, but with the
mean, without which there would be no beauty and no art, whether the art
of the statesman or the art of weaving or any other; for all the arts guard
against excess or defect, which are real evils.36
Most relevant for us are not specific numerical relations per se, but the
expectation that cultural productions require the imposition of a rationale of measure
to turn raw nature into the higher-level constructs comprising culture. Culture
requires a proportioning process. Excesses or deficiencies in these proportions are

moral lacks; for Plato they were downright evils. But again, for Liu Xie, wen “is
born together with heaven and earth.” The Chinese correlative view assumes that
culture itself is on par with nature. This allows for a wide range of empirical “looks”
in cultural productions, none of which would necessarily be regarded as artifactual
as such. The highly strategized elements of the literati garden would not come
across as staged (Figure 1.5b); the seeming randomness of pigs squealing and fence
posts without fencing would not come across as morally deficient.
I suggest that, rather than proportion, wen (= pattern, culture) in the Chinese
ideology of culture provides no mandate to uniformly arrange things in accordance
with privileged ruling measures.
Song philosophy does say that li, principle, is both one and in all at the same
time. Chapter 2 referred to Zhu Xi’s image of the moon, as one, and moonlight
reflected on waters, as many.37 But how li is expressed in each thing is just how
li is expressed in that thing. There is no sense in which the li of one thing requires
the li of another to be arranged by human rational agency to achieve a more desirable
“mean.” This is to say there is no need for a proportionalizing operation. There
is no impetus to impose, whether by number or by theory, a distributive logical
framework on a collection of objects, the absence of which is conceived of as
disorder, or perhaps clutter in a pejorative sense. An aesthetics of Chinese built
environments demands no such overarching framework. Chinese clutter in this
sense, then, is not Greco-European clutter.
One might object and point to Chinese imperial city plans. Since the Kao2 Gong1
Ji4 (hereafter Kaogongji) from early Zhou times, imperial city plans have conformed
to the same regulating scheme. Isn’t this an overarching framework resulting in
ordered domains? But the Kaogongji is not a proportioning rationale; it prescribes
a pattern for imperial city plans, indexed to cosmological ordinal directions and
divided by social hierarchies. The Kaogongji merely places entities in adjacency: the
palace city within the ruler’s city, with civilian residences in their own zones,
arranged orthogonally, outside of the royal precincts but inside the overall city
walls.38 In contrast, a proportionalizing theory would not only prescribe entities
in adjacency; raw material requiring manipulation by human rationality would be
expected to bring forth a higher, perhaps artistic, result.
Western visitors to China are often struck by the general cacophony of her
cityscapes: cars and bicycles going every which way, storefront businesses doubling
as residences, sidewalk “restaurants” springing up at dusk, and everywhere throngs
of people. These days we often hear affirmative reports about this state of affairs,
as in “I love the vibrancy of Chinese cities!” This is particularly true because mixed-
use town planning (read: New Urbanism) is all the rage. But truth be told, in the
West we only want certain kinds of mixed use. This is because the “mixed” in
mixed-use must be strictly regulated by a proportionalizing rationale. Just try
slaughtering chickens for sale in your suburban front yard, and we’ll see how far
you get with your advocacy of mixed-use. And yet my relatives in Nanjing buy
their poultry from a makeshift “chicken store” about ten feet outside their front
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stoop. (Their front door is just beyond the frame of Figure 3.4, by that chicken
in the lower right corner, thinking things over.) The operation consists of two
men arriving every morning and slaughtering chickens on a table, with gizzards
on the ground and feathers a-flying. Customers queue up regularly; no one thinks
anything is amiss. Again, historic Chinese city planning inculcated a pattern of zones.
As pattern, what falls in between those zones is not necessarily subject to a
regulating logic.
In this light it is instructive to note recent attempts to rethink the courtyard
typology. Historically, courtyard residences housed single (usually extended)
families. In the late 1980s, an architectural design team led by Professor Wu
Liangyong reconceptualized the courtyard system in the Ju’er Hutong development
in Beijing. Limited to three stories, the development commendably resisted the
more typical razing of old hutong neighborhoods and replaced them with high-
rises. But the difference between the Ju’er Hutong and its courtyard ancestor is
that the new solution boasts multiple units surrounding four courtyards. This move
changed the social pattern of the courtyard: it is no longer an “inside” relative to
a single family as in the historic case; it is instead an “outside” relative to many
families. And we have seen how “outsides” relative to spaces regulated by familial
relations tend to be environmentally less tended (Figure 1.6). We see this same
tendency in the Ju’er Hutong courtyards (Figure 3.5). Donia Zhang reports how
scarcely these courtyards are used; how they are only repositories for parked bicycles.
To foster a sense of community, Zhang suggests a range of design interventions,
FIGURE 3.4 A “chicken store” in Nanjing.

FIGURE 3.5 A courtyard space in the Ju’er Hutong complex, Beijing.
from increasing courtyard sizes to adding recreational or aesthetic amenities, or

both.39 But Zhang might be missing the point because, again, while the form of
the courtyard is retained in the design, its historic pattern (perhaps its li, in the
Song sense of principle) is altered, in that the courtyard in the Ju’er Hutong is not
the interior heart of a family; it has become part of the problematic exterior. In
the pattern-based Chinese approach abutting social-physical entities next to each
other, interstitial spaces between familial entities are simply part of the overall urban
pattern that receive less care.
The impact of Chinese garden design on the British picturesque tradition in
the eighteenth century is another illustration of the difference between patterning
and proportioning. Particularly in southern China, literati gardens flourished
behind the walls of the homes of their owners (Figure 1.5b). These gardens are
patterns within the larger pattern of a Chinese city such as, say, Suzhou. Along
the streets outside the walls that contain these gardens, one gets no sense of the
gardened worlds behind them. The street is another entity adjacent to the garden-
residence. In the patterning approach, there is no ideological impetus to bring the
aesthetic depths of the latter into the former. Compare this to an excerpt from
Christopher Hussey’s description of the British picturesque:
William Kent has usually been recognized as the originator of landscape

gardening, on the strength of Walpole’s sentence, “Kent first leaped the fence
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and saw all of nature as a garden . . .” it was the substitution by Vanbrugh

of a ha-ha (a depressed swale used typically to demark the edge of a landscape
garden) for a fence that enabled Kent to leap it . . . enough of Vanbrugh’s
work survives to prove that it was he who first conceived the approximation
of gardens to painted landscapes . . . The results of this revolution in gardening
were far reaching. “Why may not a whole Estate,” asked Addison in 1712,
“be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent Plantations.”40
A proportioning approach leaps over walls, as it were, to impose a cultural vision

upon an entire land. In fact the picturesque sensibility not only manipulates raw
nature into composed scenes, doing so resonated with the cultivation of moral
character as well. And so dilettantes such as Kent, or Humphrey Repton, or Uvedale
Price, and others who promoted the picturesque aesthetic were called “improvers.”
Archibald Alison, a philosopher of the picturesque, noted that the goal was not
only “the mere assemblage of picturesque incidents” but also:
some decided expression, to which the meaning of the several parts may be
referred and which, by affording, as it were, the key of the scene, may lead
us to feel from the whole of the composition that full and undisturbed emotion
which we are prepared to indulge.41
This kind of outlook is not constrained by a pattern of boundaries. If anything

it seeks to conquer boundaries—perhaps by leaping over them—and imposing its
own proportionalizing rationale on the raw material of nature. This is in fact what
the Jeffersonian grid did to the landmass that would become the United States.
James Howard Kunstler, in his The Geography of Nowhere, notes how in the early
days of the nation the US government projected an immense grid over the totality
of the land, blind to the undulations of mountains and valleys, in order to strategize
an ordered national realm.42 Town squares often index from this grid. Indeed the
American lawn of today is more or less an outcome of this grid, the tamed version
of a once wild and primitive expanse. Just as the pioneers walked beside their wagons
across the land to find a new life for themselves, Americans now walk behind their
Sears Craftsman mowers across their lawns, and in doing so re-enact the search
for place, and experience (or perhaps indulge in) the joy of having found it. All
of this, I suggest, participates in essentially a proportionalizing gestalt in the
experience of cultural environments. There is very little in Chinese philosophy
that supports this approach. There are many ideas in the Greco-European lineage
that do.
Time and Accrual

The Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki elevates grime to the level of a desirable
quality in Asian aesthetics:
Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the

glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow
describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen
produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of
handling—which is to say grime . . . I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive
if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate
it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it.43
While Tanizaki’s lauding of grime might be striking, the operative factor here
is time. The last chapter considered how the Greco-European tradition linearized
the reception of time, with forward movement along this line regarded as progress.
This view of time privileges the Present Empirical Object not only because that
object is the latest representation of the trek forward; as such it represents the latest
improvement on the past. Architectural theories in this tradition typically promote
the new by rejecting the past. (Adolf Loos comes to mind: it was not content to
theorize an ornament-less architecture; using ornament in the modern era is tanta-
mount to committing a crime;44 examples of this outlook abound.) The here and
now cannot accept coexistence with past solutions. It is not surprising that this
inclination has a tendency to eradicate “every speck of grime” as well. The Present
Empirical Object must also be a shiny object; newness is not compatible with the
wear and tear of the old.
Tanizaki’s idealization of grime betrays different sensibilities vis-à-vis time. While
the elapse of time is universal in human experience, the correlative view places
less responsibility on the elusive NOW. The NOW is not necessarily a marker for
progress; neither must it demonstrate any correctives for yesterday’s now-perceived
shortcomings. The NOW in Tanizaki’s observation in fact prizes the present impact
of the past, in the form of the markings of age. Far from eradicating the signs of
wear and tear, markings of the past presence the past in the present. Tanizaki’s
term is glow, the glow that emits from an object being handled through years of
use. It is worthwhile comparing this glow with Ficino’s glow cited in Chapter 2.
For Ficino, glow descends from above, after the object has been well prepared or,
on our terms, well proportioned. Ficino’s glow has the brightness transcendental
presence deserves, and if the Machine took away transcendental sensibilities, what
we have left is the obsession for whiteness and shininess that mystifies Tanizaki.
For Tanizaki, it is shadows that must be praised, because the glow of prolonged
handling renders that presence dim. It is precisely this dimness that makes the past
present in Asian aesthetic experience.
How would Tanizaki’s aesthetics of grime inform historic preservation? Of course
in keeping with the theorizing proclivities of the Eye/I in Figure 1.3b, what historic
preservation is, is itself an intense object of theory. Is it the original condition
preserved with intentional means? Is it to recreate original features of the past
condition, but with new materials? How much does preservation of the past accom-
modate adaptive reuse? The American Institute of Architects uses the technical
terms preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction to conceptually
76 Past
demarcate these subtle distinctions.45 But the end goal for all of these categories is
a new Present Empirical Object. Achieving this object is the unquestioned baseline
for preservation of any kind. But in Chapter 1 we touched on grass growing on
Ming and Qing dynasty structures, the entire ensemble exuding the fatigue of years
of disrepair, with not much updating. Perhaps this is not a lack of care. Perhaps
this is a liking for accrual.
Accrual also foregrounds a spatial aspect to environmental aesthetics. Tanizaki’s
famous essay invokes a wide variety of everyday weathered objects: bowls, pens,
paper, shadowy alcoves, the red glow of coals in old stoves, outhouses in the woods,
clothing as “no more than a part of the darkness,” dark miso soup “from the dimly
lit houses of the past.” And so on. What we have here is a marriage of temporal
haziness with spatial dimness; the accrued markings of use over time distribute muted
tones spatially, because the objects of use populate their environments fully. If the
rimless correlative domain of Figure 1.3a has an environmental coloration, it would
be in the range of the darker values, which is to say, of shadows. One result is a
sense of aesthetic depth in the midst of ordinary everyday environments. It explains
why this sensibility does not require “objects of art” to be placed in strategized
locations.46 The environmental shades themselves achieve an aesthetic whole.
We can itemize—in true theory-building fashion—several categories of this
phenomenon as follows:
• Hiddenness: “her body shrouded, her face the only sign of her existence.”47
• An emphasis on interiority: built environments of interiorized worlds that rhyme
with the Eye/I’s sense of membership in the larger correlative whole.
• Blending in: “we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of
shadows.”48 Note again the theme of patterns as opposed to proportions.
• And finally, As-is-ness: “we content ourselves with things as they are, so darkness
causes no discontent.”49 (I will return to as-is-ness in Chapter 6).
• And so “the world of shadows . . . [is] superior to wall paintings or
ornament.”50
As Tanizaki himself repeatedly notes, his sentiments are by no means exclusively

Japanese; they have deep roots in Chinese ideas. For instance, the spatial aspect is
underlined by Laozi in his insistence that the Dao is empty, but with a capacity
that is never exhausted; “it becomes one with the dusty world.”51 What fills a space
through time is mere participant in the much larger, because more primal, spatial
emptiness of the Dao. Again: “Cut out doors and windows in order to make a
room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the
use of the room.”52 For Zuangzi, in his project of erasing all distinctions of
measure—scale, size, distance, relative beauty, cognitive capacity, human/animal
differences in preference, and so on—shadows are not caused; they just are:
The Shade asked the Shadow, “A little while ago you moved, and now you
stop. A little while ago you sat down and now you stand up. Why this
FIGURE 3.6 Latticework and layers of inside–inside to inside–outside space in

The Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou.
instability of purpose?” “Do I depend on something else to be this way?

. . . How can I tell why I am so and I am not so?”53
In reading Zuangzi, one never gets the sense that the world of his stories and
aphorisms is a brightly lit, sunny world. “In the darkness of the north there is a
fish, whose name is Vast. This fish is enormous, I don’t know how many thousand
miles long.”54 Or: “I shall ride the bird of ease and emptiness and go beyond the
compass of the world and wander in the land of nowhere and the region of
nothing.”55 Or: “The season of autumn floods had come and the hundred rivers
were pouring into the Yellow River. The waters were churning and so wide that
. . . it was impossible to distinguish an ox from a horse.”56 The sense one gets is
awareness of an immense spatial domain—and perhaps the haziness that comes with
such immensity—in which the human presence is quite small, and the objects of
value human beings hold dear quite insignificant. It is within this spatial setting
that objects of use accrue their markings over time, and instill in the Eye/I a sense
of belonging.
Qi and Environmental Aesthetics

I conclude by assessing how Chinese cosmology—specifically, the view that all
things are composed of qi—impacts environmental aesthetics. We can discern two
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lines of understanding qi in Chinese philosophy. One is simply that qi makes up

all things: the lighter qi ascends; the heavier qi coalesces into material bodies,
including human beings. The other line sees qi as a moral force that can be directed
and trained. I have already cited Mencius, who speaks of nourishing one’s qi with
integrity so that it fills heaven and earth: “It is a qi which unites rightness and the
Way.”57 Ming Dong Gu identifies this Mencian formulation as the basis for the
aesthetic turn in comprehending qi in Chinese ideas.58 Gu holds that it sheds light
on the literary technical term wen2 qi4, the capacity, or talent, of a writer to produce
works of an aesthetic timbre unique to that writer. The sage (or virtuous person,
or writer) is one who powerfully expresses his or her qi in achieving ends of
communal well-being or artistic excellence such that the moral impact “fills
heaven and earth.” How do these two lines of understanding qi impact environ-
mental aesthetics?
Shapes. Intertwine wen (pattern) as culture with wen, meaning literature, and qi
as not only formative content but also formative power, and it is not unusual for
empirical shapes to attain narrative power. And so if a natural outcropping looks
like an elephant, the formation is much prized, and cultural meanings are projected
onto it (see Figure 3.7). Shapes may also exert moral causality in human affairs;
this outlook forms the basis of the Forms school of feng shui prognostication.
Maurice Freeman cites a case from Guangdong Province, where crops regularly
failed at a particular site. The mystery was solved when it was determined that the
surrounding mountainsides evoked the formal attributes of a rat. When the locals
erected a monumental gateway that resembled a rat trap, the crops prospered.59
FIGURE 3.7 Elephant Rock, Guilin, Guangxi Province.

All of this shows a propensity to leave shapes be, while incorporating them into
cultural narratives of not only acceptance, but also prosperity.
Surprise. Characterizing environments as cluttered does not exclude moments
of extraordinary order and pristineness. The literati garden is an obvious example.
In these gardens, layers and layers of inside–inside to inside–outside to outside–
outside spaces are meticulously arranged. “Borrowed views” are also planned,
in which objects beyond the walls are nevertheless embraced as elements in
strategically designed vistas. But the word “moment” is apt to describe these cases;
this is to say that instances of pristineness stand out precisely because they are moments
in a larger riot of hubbub. We have already addressed how the pattern-based
approach to planning does not deploy a proportional regime across an
environmental array. The only point to add here is that the patterned approach
paves the way for what might be termed an aesthetics of surprise. Because qi emits
from the organic workings of yin yang, and this in the midst of a much larger
complexity of moving parts, you just never know what might spring up. A typical
literati garden is filled with unexpected twists, small niches of light, borrowed vistas;
even the bonsai plants at strategic locations are themselves icons of meticulous
manipulation for aesthetic effect. The garden itself may be a moment of surprise,
hidden behind the walls that stitch the urban fabric together. Chan Buddhism’s
search for sudden enlightenment no doubt motivates these moments of surprise.
One also recalls the Lotus Sutra, favored by T’iantai Buddhism: “The Buddha is
unattached to the mundane world and is like the lotus flower.”60 The image of
the white lotus flower elegantly rising out of a muddy pond is something of an
ideal in this aesthetic tradition. If the lotus’s purity is an instance of beauty, it is
beautiful because it is surprising.
The element of the unexpected plays a significant role in Chinese literature.
One famous example is the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the East, a fanciful account
of the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang’s journey to India to retrieve Buddhist texts.
The novel is animated throughout by juxtapositions between earthly and
supernatural realms as Xuanzang makes his way with his entourage.61 The most
famous of this troupe is the monkey Sun Wukong, who easily traverses vast distances
on a cloud, transforms his cudgel into thousands of times its normal size, and changes
one hair of his body into thousands of monkeys. Another example from the early
Qing dynasty is Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, which is filled
with phenomena such as a little person coming out of an unsuspecting scholar’s
ear, “fox spirits” appearing as beautiful women to seduce always available men,
and so on.62 The movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon depicts martial artists
effortlessly flying through the air, easily dodging the parries of swords and knives.
It captures a gestalt of popular stories in China, much like cowboy Westerns lodge
in the collective American memory. It is a gestalt informed by centuries of
Buddhist and Daoist ideals processed at a colloquial level. It is a gestalt that prizes
the surprising powers of qi when cultivated to “fill heaven and earth.” Sometimes
this colloquial expectation for the unexpected can have tragic results. For example,
the Boxer Rebellion of 1898 (of which more in later chapters) was led largely by
80 Past
peasants who believed themselves to be imbued with surprising powers, and

immune to bullets. Their downfall was one of the last straws in the demise of
Imperial China.
Ordinary special things. Mencius’s “flood-like qi,” and the wen-qi ideal that
derives from it, centers aesthetic power in the artist perhaps beyond the extent to
which artists in the West may be revered. One way this is expressed is that, in
China and in most Asian contexts, “art” is not restricted to a limited category of
things. The outset of this chapter noted that “fine art” emerged in the West as
objects of aesthetic enjoyment for the social class of people who had time for leisure.
This is a significant departure from the original Greek notion of tekne, often translated
art. Tekne means something like “excellence in the execution of a task.” The task
itself can be many things: from the tekne of saddle making to the tekne of statecraft.
We still get this sense in such phrases as “the art of cooking,” or “the medical
arts,” or “Mary’s pies are so good they are works of art.” But in qi, particularly in
its active Mencian derivation, Chinese ideas provide a powerful justification for
ongoing appreciation of ordinary things attaining to the status of art. If these objects
are produced by the focused qi of the creator, they are treasured, even if they are
objects of everyday use. Throughout the years the Chinese script has itself been a
platform for expressing qi simply in the act of writing. This is so much the case
that qi can blur the line between an “original” and a “copy” of a work. Famous
poems are copies through the centuries simply because every iteration can be valued,
if the work betrays the power of the original qi coming through again. In Japan,
there are the “Living National Treasures,” individuals who have attained to the
highest quality of expression in the objects of art they make. It is just that these
objects are paper, bells, dolls, pottery, and other things that have long been taken
over by machines in the West.
In sum we can cite the Sinologist Haun Saussy’s attempt to capture the
definition of wen culture:
Wen is (to cite several dictionaries at once) markings; patterns; stripes, streaks,
lines, veins; whorls; bands; writing, graph, expression, composition;
ceremony, culture, refinement, education, ornament, elegance, civility; civil
as opposed to military; literature.63
Wen culture is a cluttered array of things.
Notes
1 See Meng Yan, “Urban Villages,” Architectural Design, 78:5 (September/October 2008),
56–59.
2 URBANUS Selected Projects 1999–2007 (Beijing: Zhong Guo Jian Zhu Gong Ye Chu
Ban Shi, 2007), 213.
3 Dieter Hassenpflug, Cheng shi: The Urban Code of China (Basel: Birkhauser, 2010), 24.
4 Ibid., 26.
5 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “The Great Theory of Beauty and Its Decline,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31:2 (Winter, 1972), 165–180.
6 Here Tatarkiewicz is citing Aquinas, ibid., 166.

7 For example, see Liu Hseih (Liu Xie), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, trans.
Vincent Yu-chung Shih (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). For example:
“the pithy phrase is always a thing of beauty”, 60; “each writer has his own beauty and
has preserved for us his characteristic style”, 140; “added processes of weaving and spinning
have given the cloth beauty and made it precious”, 156, etc. At least, these seem to single
out beauty as a distinctive trait.
8 See also Ming Dong Gu’s note that the literary categories yanggang zhi mei and yinrou
zhi mei bear close similarities to the sublime and the beautiful. “From Yuanqi (Primal
Energy) to Wenqi (Literary Pneuma): A Philosophical Study of a Chinese Aesthetic,”
Philosophy East and West, 59:1 ( January, 2009), 22–46.
9 Jonathan Star (trans), Tao Te Ching (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001). For
each occurrence of mei, Star lists the stanza along with the numerical location of the
character in the stanza: 02–05, 02–08, 31–54, 31–56, 62–17, 80–49, 81–04, 81–05. Note
that in six of these eight cases, the word is mentioned twice in one context. In other
words, this reduces the sheer number of times the character we translate “beauty” occurs
to five.
10 Chinese Text Project, Analects, with English translation by James Legge. http://ctext.org/
analects?searchu=%E7%BE%8E. Accessed December 10, 2014.
11 “Dasein has been thrown into existence. It exists as an entity which has to be as it is and
as it can be.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1962), 321 (276–277 original pagination).
12 Jeffery Meyer addresses this in “Feng-shui of the Chinese City,” History of Religions 18:2
(November, 1978), 149: “There are simply too many variables of site and cosmic-
geomantic factors to allow for consistent analysis.”
13 Dahua Cui and Huang Deyuan, “A Weakness in Confucianism: Private and Public
Moralities,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China: 4 (October, 2007), 517–532.
14 Star, Tao De Jing, verse 17, op. cit. 30.
15 Ibid., verse 23, 36.
16 A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Dao (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing,
1989), 53–56.
17 Star, Tao De Jing, verse 2, op. cit. 15.
18 Ibid., verse 80, 175.
19 Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 396–397.
20 “The Platform Scripture,” in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 436.
21 “Recorded Conversations of Shen-Hui,” in ibid., 441.
22 “Recorded Conversations of Zen Master I-Hsuan,” in ibid., 446.
23 “Recorded Conversations of Shen-Hui, in ibid., 445.
24 Cited in Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China, 4th edn. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999), 168. Italics added.
25 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature. The work is included in its entirety in
Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Young Emerson’s Transcendental Vision (Hartford, CT:
Transcendental Books, 1971). Italics added.
26 Chu His (Zhu Xi), “The Nature and the Decree,” in Philosophy of Human Nature, trans.
J. Percy Bruce (London: Probstain, 1922), 3. “Recorded Conversations of Zen Master
I-Hsuan,” in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 441.
27 Analects 1.6, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 3.
28 Wing Tsit-Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press,
1963), 20.
29 Even Lothar von Falkenhausen, whose guarded analysis of the word does not to support
“pattern” in early usage per se, acknowledges that wen was associated with pattern as early
as the Shuo-1 wen-2 Jie-2 zi-4, the etymological dictionary of the Han dynasty. Lothar
von Falkenhausen, “The Concept of Wen in the Ancient Chinese Ancestral Cult,” Chinese
Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (December, 1996), 1–22.
30 Liu Hseih (Liu Xie), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, op. cit., 8.
82 Past
31 Donald Mungello, “Neo-Confucianism and Wen Jen Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophy East
and West 19:4 (October, 1969), 367–383.
32 Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon (London: John Murray, 1959), 86.
33 Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
34 Michael Pollan, “The Idea of a Garden,” in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New
York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1991), 209–238.
35 Aristotle, Physics III.2.8. Translation by Wm Ogle, RP Hardie, and RK Gaye.
From: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/physics/book2.html. Accessed 15
Feburary 2015.
36 Plato, Statesman, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3, trans. Benjamin Jowett, digital edition
2010, page 554. https://books.google.com. Accessed March 2, 2016.
37 Zhu Xi’s famous example is that of the moon as one and reflected moonlight on water
as many; both exist at the same time. This is addressed in Chapter 2.
38 Diagrams of the wang2 cheng2, or ruler’s city plan as prescribed by the Kaogongji, is very
commonly available via internet search engines.
39 Donia Zhang, “New Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Direction of Future Housing
Development,” in Urban Design International 11 (2006), 133–150.
40 Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque, 1927 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 128.
41 Cited in Mavis Batey, “The Picturesque: An Overview,” Garden History 22:2 (Winter,
1994), 121–132.
42 James Howard Kunstler, “Life on the Gridiron,” in The Geography of Nowhere (New York:
Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Books, 1994), 29–30.
43 Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G.
Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 11.
44 Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/
pdfs/Loos.pdf. Accessed February 11, 2016.
45 American Institute of Architects, “A Guide to Historic Preservation,” www.aia.org/
aiaucmp/groups/aia/documents/pdf/aias075381.pdf. Accessed January 12, 2015.
46 “Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident,
where we see objects arrayed symmetrically . . . In Western houses we are confronted
with what appears to us useless reiteration.” Kakuzo Okakura, Book of Tea (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1989), 90.
47 Tanizaki, op. cit., 2.
50 Tanizaki, op. cit., 19–21.
51 Tao Te Ching 4, trans. Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 141.
52 Tao Te Ching 11, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1963), 67.
53 “The Mysterical Way of Chuang Tzu,” trans. Wing-Tsit Chan, op. cit., 190.
54 “Wandering Where You Will,” in The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer
(Penguin, 1996), 1.
55 “Dealing with Emperors and Kings,” in ibid., 61.
56 “Season of Autumn Floods,” in ibid., 137.
57 Mencius 2A:2, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1970), 77.
58 Ming Dong Gu, ibid., 27–28.
59 Maurice Freeman, “Geomancy,” in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland (1968), 5–15.
60 Lotus Sutra, in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 368.
61 Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West, 4 vols (Beijing Languages Press, 2001).
62 Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, trans. John Minford (New York: Penguin,
2006).
63 Haun Saussy, “The Prestige of Writing: Wen2, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography,” Sino-
Platonic Papers 75:2 (February, 1997).
PART II
Present
4
THE POSITIVIST TURN
The Loss of Apperception in Present-
day Chinese Architecture
In considering the “present” of Chinese architecture, one point needs to be

underlined first: China did not have an industrial revolution; had an industrial
revolution thrust upon it. The absence of indigenous ideas to accommodate the
emergence of the Machine, and so the lack of a philosophical infrastructure to
allow for a more or less seamless progression from a world of natural functions to
a world of machine-enabled life, lies at the heart of the problems that confronted
Chinese society beginning, say, in 1840.1 In this chapter I consider the impact of
this technological imposition on Chinese architecture in the modern age.
Machines (small “m”) were commonplace in both Europe and China through-
out the centuries. But since the Industrial Revolution that began in England in
the mid-eighteenth century, the Machine as an ideology transformed European
civilization. So much was this the case that it takes works such as Jacques Ellul’s
The Technological Society to remind us that the very ontology of our thought
and behaviour has been machined. Ellul speaks of a technological consciousness
that characterizes industrial civilization; his operative term is technique: “technique
transforms everything it touches into a machine.”2 All of culture becomes
technologized:
it ranges from the act of shaving to the act of organizing the landing at
Normandy . . . today no human activity escapes this technical imperative.
There is a technique of organization . . . just as there is a technique of
friendship and a technique of swimming.3
This was not the case in China. Even though movable press, gunpowder, the
compass, and papermaking were all arguably innovated in China prior to their
emergence in the European West, it never occurred to the Chinese correlative
outlook before the later Qing period that these were commodities that could be
harnessed for economic gain and, in the process, change a natural state of affairs
86 Present
into one that afforded artificial means for human comfort. The word artificial here
is key. It is related to artifice, from the Latin artificium, which is based on ars, meaning
art, and facere, meaning make.4 Herbert Simon’s seminal work Sciences of the Artificial
(1969) still informs in this regard. Simon held that artificial things are objects of
human forethought; they “may imitate appearances in natural things while lacking
. . . the reality of the latter”, and they are fundamentally “characterized in terms
of functions, goals, (and) adaptation.” Simon goes on to say that a science of the
artificial is “closely akin to a science of engineering” and, significantly for us, an
artificial (engineered) thing necessarily creates an “interface” between it and its
natural environment.5
By the present in Chinese architecture, I mean a Chinese architecture that became
artificial, a Chinese architecture that required interfaces between the architectural
objects themselves and their surrounding natural-social contexts, and a Chinese
architecture that became a product of engineering in the Simonian sense.
I mean a Chinese architecture that became self-conscious. To analogize from
a well-known story of origins, after it ate of the apple of Western science and tekne
(= art, technology, excellence in craft), Chinese architecture’s eyes were opened,
as it were, and it realized it needed to be clothed. It needed façades. In this vein
Zhao Chen’s recollections of his teacher Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) is informative.
We have already noted Liang’s status as the “father” of modern Chinese
architecture.6 He was among the first cohort of young Chinese architects to be
educated in the West. Indeed, because of this Western training, he was among the
first to be called a professional architect, a classification that did not exist in imperial
China. Upon his return from a Beaux-Arts education at the University of
Pennsylvania, Liang started an architecture program at Northeastern University in
1928 (schools of architecture were also a new phenomenon in China in his day).
Later, in 1946, he founded the architecture program at Beijing’s Qinhua University.
Throughout his career, Liang was concerned with establishing a Chinese “national”
architectural style, a goal that earned him both accolades and demerits under the
Nationalist and then the Communist regimes respectively. At any rate, years after
Liang had begun his work upon returning from abroad, Zhao Chen recalls his
teacher’s insistence that historic Chinese post-and-lintel structures had façades—
while reporting his own coming-to-awareness that, in fact, they didn’t. For Chen,
Liang’s need for façades on China’s historic structures is thanks to his Beaux-Arts
training under Paul Philippe Cret at Penn.7 Chen is not saying that historic Chinese
buildings did not have the vertical dimension; his point is that Liang’s façade
consciousness was a product of his training in the West. Delin Lai has argued, for
example, that when Liang acted as consultant architect to the National Central
Museum in Nanjing in the 1930s, the structural rationalism of Viollet-le-Duc and
Auguste Choisy—that is, the honest expression of structural integrity in the form
of a building—informed his thinking. Lai explains in detail how the design of the
museum translated the historic wooden bracket sets (dou3 gong3) above the lintel
into concrete expressions, larger at the column cornices, smaller along the lintel
midspan.8 This is one illustration of Liang’s façade awareness.
Positivism and the Loss of Apperception 87
FIGURE 4.1 National Central Museum, Nanjing.
What was the Beaux-Arts approach to architectural design? David van Zanten
gives a three-part definition:
(1) A technique of progressive design elaboration that started with an idea and
ended with a spatial form, which (2) posed certain selections among choices
of shape and relationship, obliging the designer to take a philosophical stand,
which thus (3) generated something that, at the last step, was adjusted to flash
into three-dimensions as a pictorial manifestation of the originating idea.9
This is a different approach to conceiving of architecture than the craft-based

erection of buildings that had been standard practice in China. The Beaux-Arts
approach saw a well-designed building as the empirical expression of an idea. Idea
is different from fen4, the socially indexed unit of measure that determined not
only the size but also the look of historic Chinese buildings; we saw this in Chapter
2. In contrast, idea is resident in the mind of the Beaux-Arts architect. From that
locus of subjectivity, the architect must then situate the idea in “a philosophical
stand,” such that it culminates in “a three-dimensional pictorial manifestation.”
This is the Platonism that drove the proliferation of Greco-European architectural
styles, as we also saw in Chapter 2. All of this is to say that Liang Sicheng brought
back to China the way of thinking of the Eye/I shown in Figure 1.3b. Liang
returned to China with a mission, not for accepting architecture in China as it
historically was, but for architecture in China to have a history. In his foreword to
Wilma Fairbank’s biography of Liang and his wife Lin Huiyin, Jonathan Spence
insightfully notes that “we remember, of course, what we want to remember.”10
Upon commencing his lifework in China, Liang “remembered” that historic
Chinese buildings must have façades. The façade is one of the most notable problems
for Chinese architecture after it became self-conscious.
88 Present
Another way to describe this coming-to-self-consciousness is that Chinese

architecture lost its apperceptive quality. I define this term in more depth below;
suffice it to say here that apperception is the unreflective, hence immediate, reception
of the Eye/I to all it is immersed in; refer again to Figure 1.3a. The loss of this
unreflective condition is the loss of apperception. As I explain below, this loss in
China took place during a period beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842)
and continuing to the present day. What took apperception’s place was (and largely
still is) a turn towards positivism. By this term I mean a view that all natural
phenomena, indeed all of life experience, can be comprehended by scientific
calculation, to the exclusion of any need for non-empirical inputs.11 The positivist
outlook relates to nature not as a given condition in which to exist, but as raw
material to transform into an improved condition for human life. At the turn of
the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals wholeheartedly embraced this view.
As Rana Mitter has noted, the European Enlightenment ideal that “ ‘rationality’
and a scientific mindset were sufficient to unlock the ordering of the world and
its societies”12 was particularly attractive. This fervor found expression in the rallying
calls for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” as the prescriptions for solving China’s
ills in those years.13 In what follows I consider the impact of this positivist turn on
architecture in China throughout the twentieth century, even to the present day.
I first situate the positivist turn in its historical setting. I then explain apperception
in more detail, with a small aside to (what I call) the phenomenological-positivist
chiasm, or crossover, between European and Chinese ideas at the turn of the
twentieth century. I then itemize some traits of architecture in China after
apperception was lost.
The Positivist Turn

The Industrial Revolution that began in England in the mid-eighteenth century
played a significant role in ushering China into the modern age. Of course China
had dealings with the European West prior to that time. China had an awareness
of the Roman Empire in the first century BCE.14 The traffic along the Silk Road
routes was a source of ongoing exchange; Buddhism itself arrived and subsequently
flourished in China along these routes. Nestorian Christianity penetrated to
Chang’an (present day Xi’an) in the seventh century.15 And reports of Marco Polo’s
travels in Yuan dynasty China in the thirteenth century are probably true. By the
Ming period (1368–1644 CE), Christian missionary presence in China is well
documented. The iconic example is Matteo Ricci (1552–1610 CE), who enjoyed
a court-sponsored life in Beijing in the seventeenth century, and brought with
him knowledge of astronomy and cartography. Following Ricci, the German Jesuit
Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) advised the first Qing emperor and
introduced innovations in mathematics and also astronomy.
If we were to chart the number of European contacts with China over the
centuries, the graph would show a scatterplot of dots, until the later Ming, and
into the Qing periods. By the Qing period, we can imagine those dots beginning
to link into a continuous line. In turn, the Qing dynasty, the last of China’s imperial
dynasties—its dates are 1644–1911—roughly parallels the emergence of the
scientific-technological outlook in the European West, and the maturing of that
outlook into an ideology of life, this by means of the Industrial Revolution and
its aftermath. The Machine not only expanded human powers mechanically; its
very ideology is expansive. It is no accident that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,
published in 1776, promoted free trade between nations globally: the increase in
manufactures enabled by the Machine led to an expanded economic vision.16 And
this of course redefined national identity at a political level. This impetus for
economic and political expansion in Britain, and in Europe in general, brought
on by the Machine, impacted China enormously.
In art and architecture, Jianfei Zhu has noted that linear perspective was
introduced to China during this time: the painter Giuseppe Castiglione did a well-
known portrait of the Qianlong Emperor on his throne in one-point perspective.17
Zhu notes Castiglione’s influence is also seen in the “Western-style” pavilions (xi1
yang4 lou2) designed and built in Beijing between 1747 and 1786. These pavilions
had baroque façades and were organized along axes that emphasized spatial
perspective (Figure 4.2). Perspective is a way of apportioning the natural world
along mathematical lines. Here we can again recall Figure 1.2. For Dürer’s artist,
FIGURE 4.2 A “Western-style” pavilion in ruins in the old Summer Palace northwest
of the Forbidden City, Beijing.
90 Present
the use of the grid for “sighting” the world is not only a technical tool; it
technologizes the way any presentation is conceived of and seen, per Ellul’s point
noted above. I suggest that perspectivalism, in this technologizing sense, spurs the
organization of façades and axes, resulting in engineered compositions, in the
Simonian sense, ones that are imposed on nature as opposed to birthed out of it.
In this sense the Western-style pavilions were Western in their planning as much
as in their baroque visual attributes.
Prior to the Western-style pavilions, Chinese philosophy in the early Qing period
already had some resonances with Greco-European preferences for empirically
measurable data. It is difficult to say exactly how much of early Qing lines of thought
were explicitly thanks to Europe; we can only say, again, that European presence
in China was fairly continuous by this time. Just as Descartes was framing his “I
think therefore I am”—his Discourse on Method was published in 1637—early Qing
thinkers promoted evidential learning, kao3 zheng4.18 The collapse of the previous
dynasty, the Ming (1368–1644), brought widespread disillusionment over the
speculative neo-Confucian outlook in vogue at that time. Early Qing thinkers held
that Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) teachings, and even Zhu Xi’s before him
(1130–1200), were essentially Buddhism in Confucian dress. Evidential learning
was the Qing counteroffensive. Its promoters believed that recovery of the exact
meanings of ancient philosophical texts held promise for solving present social ills.
Out of this came rigorous philological analyses of texts and words, situating them
in their historical and cultural contexts. This required mastery of an interdisciplinary
array of topics. A leading evidentialist was Dai Zhen (1724–1777):
He became proficient in a variety of disciplines—history, mathematics,

science, astronomy, geography, archaeology, etymology, and phonology . . .
He was a most rigorous sort of scholar, imbibing the principles of geometry
and trigonometry, for example, because he wanted to understand ancient
technology and calendrical science.19
What is remarkable about this push for empirical evidence is that the focus of
research was upon the distant past. But this point aside, evidential learning moved
Chinese ideas away from speculative philosophy and towards measurable data, of
a kind that the Eye/I of Figure 1.3b would find easier to grasp. As well, Wing
Tsit-Chan notes that the early Qing thinker Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692 CE), also an
evidentialist, redefined long-standing receptions of qi4 not as the primordial
product of the oscillations of yin and yang, nor as a moral-creative power that can
“fill Heaven and Earth,” as Mencius would have it, but as concrete materiality
itself. This emphasis on materiality over metaphysics, Chan notes, made Wang “one
of the greatest philosophers in Chinese history” in the eyes of the Communist
regime,20 which drew from Marxist materialism.21 Finally, Kang Youwei
(1858–1927), a teacher to Liang Sicheng’s father, held to a view of history in which
human society progresses through three stages, culminating in a time of “Great
Unity” when even familial relations are dispensed with in a harmonious world.
This sounds Hegelian; at least, it sounds like a linear view of history derivable more
from Plato’s cave than from any Chinese ideas. In commenting on Kang’s linear
theory, Chan simply says that “the idea is probably Western (even though Kang)
insisted on tracing it to Confucius.”22 The key for us is that Kang’s linear view
bears, for example, on Liang Sicheng’s idea of the historical evolution of Chinese
architecture through stages: “The Period of Vigor (850–1050)” followed by “The
Period of Elegance (1000–1400),” and so on.23
If evidential learning in the early Qing dynasty had the looks of empiricism,
there is no doubt that the self-strengthening (zi4 qiang2) movement towards the
end of the Qing era was in every way influenced by the European technological
outlook. Again, the year 1839 marks the beginning of the First Opium War
(1839–1842), when the British Empire, to increase its economic power globally,
bombed China into submission to continue receiving ever-increasing shipments
of opium. For Britain it was an economic matter: she needed to balance trade deficits
due to her imports of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. But for China, the Opium
Wars—the second one was fought 1856–1860—were nothing less than the shock-
and-awe exposure of Chinese civilization to the power of industrial culture, that
is, to the power of the Machine. British armaments were simply no match for
anything the Chinese side was able to muster. China’s defeat in the First Opium
War resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, which designated certain coastal
cities as “treaty ports,” where British interests could engage in commerce without
restrictions; Shanghai and Xiamen (Amoy) were two of these cities. In Guangzhou,
previously enforced restrictions on foreign trade were lifted, and Hong Kong was
ceded to the British Crown. China was also forced to pay exorbitant reparations
for the cost of a war it had waged to prevent a foreign power from making countless
Chinese citizens, in effect, drug addicts. Shortly following the Treaty of Nanjing,
France and the United States took advantage of Qing weakness and also transacted
treaties granting access to commerce in China. These agreements stirred increased
opposition within China against foreign presence. It came to a head in the Second
Opium War. This led to the occupation of Guangzhou by British and French troops
in 1857 and, in 1858, the Treaty of Tianjin, which opened additional treaty ports
as far inland as the port of Hankou, one of a three-city cluster on the Yangtze
River that is now the city of Wuhan. It was at the end of the Second Opium War
that the imperial Summer Palace northwest of the Forbidden City was ransacked
by British and French forces. This is why the Western-style pavilions are in their
present condition (Figure 4.2).
Out of all this emerged the self-strengthening movement. Zi qiang is a term
coined by the southern Chinese scholar Feng Guifen (1809–1874). Feng witnessed
firsthand the humiliation of the two Opium Wars. He also lived through the internal
strife of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), a pseudo-Christian peasant anti-Qing
movement that, by the time it had played out, took the lives of millions of people.
Perhaps key in this disastrous development, for Feng, was that the Qing government
needed the assistance of British and French troops to put down the rebellion; China
couldn’t even manage its internal uprisings without the help of Western technology.
92 Present
Self-strengthening, as Feng framed it, then, amounts to the sober recognition that
China must swallow its pride and adopt the technology of the Western
“barbarians”—but must do so in a way that retains Chinese moral protocols and
social structure.24 This duality of simultaneously adopting Western technology while
insisting on retaining a Chinese cultural essence, I suggest, is the distinguishing feature
of what I call Chinese modernity. This state of affairs is shown in Figure 4.3, which
amounts to the diagrams of Figure 1.3 overlaid on each other. In future chapters,
I will regularly refer back to this diagram.
What is modernity? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus (italics added):
“An intellectual tendency or social perspective characterized by departure from or
repudiation of traditional ideas, doctrines, and cultural values in favour of
contemporary or radical values and beliefs (chiefly those of scientific rationalism and
liberalism).”25
But the adjustment to this definition for Chinese modernity is that rejection of
traditional ideas comes with the caveat that “Chineseness,” whatever that is, must
be retained. Here is Rhoads Murphy writing about the treaty ports: “To all Chinese
concerned about their country’s weakness, the treaty ports offered a powerful goad,
and to many it provided an attractive model.”26 But:
no one in China wondered, in all this turmoil, who he was . . . China was
in danger, but not Chineseness . . . Which China to embrace or try to build
was sometimes a problem, but “a sense of where you are”—what game, what
team, what league—was never lost.27
FIGURE 4.3 A diagram of Chinese modernity, derivable from the ti-yung dialectic.
At the operational level, Feng Guifen’s self-strengthening doctrine justified the

purchase of armaments: it embraced industry and railroad systems and even led to
rethinking political structures. With regard to politics, Liang Sicheng’s father, Liang
Qichiao (1873–1929 CE), was a leading activist for reform. For us this is noteworthy
because, from his earliest days, the son was influenced by a reformist outlook at
least in part traceable to European ideas. But when we note that Liang Qichiao’s
progressiveness did not deter him from teaching his son the ancient classics, we
get a better sense of the roots of the younger Liang’s commitment to preserving
China’s architectural past, even as he imposed on that past a linear historical
progression in terms that students of Hegel would understand.
Self-strengthening is a significant benchmark in the positivist turn in Chinese
ideas. It is an explicit embrace of European science, now seen as vital for Chinese
culture to move forward. Positivism’s anti-metaphysical bent resonated with
leading Chinese intellectuals’ rejection of Confucian-based social theory as
outmoded, and thus as the reason for China’s backwardness in face of the
industrialized Western nations. They had help. The British philosopher Bertrand
Russell, a positivist,28 and the American John Dewey, at least an empiricist if not
a positivist,29 both traveled and lectured in China to wide acclaim in the early 1920s.
Dewey was in China in 1919 during student uprisings in Beijing against the Versailles
Treaty. Signed in the aftermath of World War I, that treaty ceded parts of
Shandong Province to Japan without Chinese agreement. This began the May
Fourth Movement, a wholesale call by Chinese intellectuals to reject the past for
Western-style modernization. Note the irony: the “West” had just dealt China a
humiliating blow in the Versailles Treaty. Even as China recoiled in anger, it
recognized it needed to modernize to be like the West.
This raises the philosophical counterpart to self-strengthening, which is the
discourse over ti3 yung4. Ti can be translated substance, or that which is essential.
Yung can be translated function (in everyday parlance, the character simply means
“use” or “to use”). While these terms have roots in early Chinese ideas, the note-
worthy thing is that ti and yung became an oppositional pair during Qing times.
In the neo-Daoist era in the fourth century CE, ti yung was not a duality as much
as it was an unfolding of a metaphysical unity: the essence of moral rectitude (ti)
transforms society and politics (yung).30 In other words, essence expresses itself in
material manifestations. But by the Qing dynasty, ti-yung became a duality.31 As
Luke S.K. Wong has shown, initially the Qing government recruited scholars who
could grasp the essence of Chinese moral rectitude (ti) while possessing practical
administrative skills (yung). Wong notes that while this retained a sense of the ancient
unity, the yung aspect necessarily became tied to the minutiae of “prescribed
bureaucratic procedures,”32 hence bifurcating it from essence. This embryonic
duality evolved further when Confucian administrators, in dealing with Western
representatives, had to be trained in “Chinese learning for fundamental principles
(ti) and Western learning for practical application (yung).”33 Note that ti yung in
this iteration not only creates a clear operational dichotomy, it also significantly
recasts the traditional discourse in a spatial way: that which is internal to China is
94 Present
substance; that which is external from the West is function. Function understood
in this way enables the inclusion of what a European theorist such as Adolf Loos
may consider decor; that is, if what is from the West is yung and external, its use
can be applied—in the sense of appliqué—to an essential Chinese ti.
This is Peter Rowe and Seng Kuan’s approach in assessing early twentieth-
century Chinese architecture. They sort it into four categories, each predicated on
how the ti of Chinese traditional architecture confronts the yung of European styles
and methods. Their categories are: (1) Ignore the host tradition, an example being
the Peace Hotel, formerly the Sassoon Building, on the Bund in Shanghai (Figure
4.4a; (2) Use Western materials and means in buildings expressed as adaptations of
traditional Chinese structures; an example is Harry Hussey’s Peking Union Medical
College (Figure 4.4b); (3) Use European neoclassicism but employ traditional
Chinese motifs as abstracted ornament; various works by Yang Tingbao, also a
product of Penn’s architecture school, are cited as examples (see Figure 4.7); and
(4) Look to historical Chinese structures to inform a national Chinese style; Liang
Sicheng is cited as the prime example.34
Rowe and Kuan’s categories are useful. But these categories describe the
aftermath left in the wake of positivism as it struck every aspect of Chinese culture.
A more fundamental question is how to assess the philosophical impact of this reality.
Answering this question, in my view, can take us beyond a mere cataloguing of
what early modern Chinese architecture looked like. Philosophically speaking,
Rowe and Kuan’s categories all underline the fact that the essential apperceptive quality
of life and experience in the correlative view was lost. In Chapters 6 and 7, I suggest
ways forward for Chinese architecture that include cultivating better management
of this loss of apperception. I will explain this term in more detail in the next
section. After that, I will itemize how Chinese modernity (Figure 4.3)—that is,
how the loss of apperception—finds expression in Chinese architecture.
The Loss of Apperception

I take apperception from Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes how
a perceiving subject (an “I”) makes coherent sense out of all that he or she takes
in, both from the empirical world as well as from the subjective within: “Man,
. . . who knows the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also
through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which
he cannot regard as impressions of the senses.”35
Kant wished to show that our cognitive apparatus is able to synthesize all inputs
at any one time—and also across time (e.g. I don’t have to get reacquainted
with my cat each time I see her; my past experiences tell me immediately she is
my cat, etc.)—as a holistic experiential reality. The ability to synthesize all inputs
into coherent single experiences Kant called the transcendental unity of
apperception.36 Apperception in this sense, then, is a priori to any determinative
judgement; it is a priori to any thought at all. The philosopher Roger Scruton
summarizes it this way:
FIGURE 4.4a Sassoon Building (now Peace Hotel), Shanghai. Palmer and Turner
Architects, 1929.
FIGURE 4.4b Peking Union Medical College as it is today, Beijing. Designed by

Harry Hussey in 1921.
96 Present
It consists of my immediate awareness that simultaneous experiences belong

to me. I know immediately that this thought, and this perception, are equally
mine, in the sense of belonging to the unity of consciousness which defines
my point of view. Doubt is here impossible: I could never be in the position
that Dickens in Hard Times attributes to Mrs. Gradgrind on her deathbed,
knowing that there is a pain in the room somewhere, but not knowing that
it (was hers).37
My point is that the twentieth-century reception of architecture in China lost

this immediate, unreflective, phenomenological unity. To apply Scruton’s illustration
to our case, if Chinese architecture can be likened to Mrs. Gradgrind, she now
experiences a pain in the room but she doesn’t know it is hers. This loss of
phenomenological immediacy is what I term the loss of apperception. What results
is a proliferation of questions over what Chinese architecture ought to be. It is at
this point that Rowe and Kuan’s architectural categories can be situated in a larger
philosophical framework of the Chinese cultural condition in the twentieth
century. Refer again to Figure 1.1, the painting titled Wang Xizhi Watching Geese.
As Wang looks beyond the pavilion, he sees “a million differences, none out of
tune.” These constant transformations include the participation of the perceiver
(Wang) as well as the pavilion in which he happens to be located. In this sense,
the being-in-the-world-ness of the world of the painting is a totality: the person
perceiving and the things perceived are a holism. Within this outlook, architecture-
as-object was not something special that required removed contemplation; rather,
its presence is as unreflectively immediate as anything else. Architecture is received
by the Eye/I, in Kant’s words, as “acts and inner determinations which he cannot
regard as impressions of the senses.” Therefore there is nothing to account for; but
rather simply to receive as present. This is phenomenological apperception vis-à-
vis traditional Chinese architecture. When the scientism of the Industrial
Revolution came to China, this apperception was lost, and Chinese architects—
again, the role itself is a creation of the removed scientific outlook—began to perceive
from their newly found professional position that buildings needed to be something.
What follows is an accounting, on philosophical terms, of the problems that arise
when architectural apperception was lost in China.
* * *
I begin with an aside, what I call the phenomenological-positivist chiasm that

occurred at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century
between ideas in China and in Europe. This section is not necessarily germane to
sections after this one, so the reader can go to the next section, Façade-ism, directly.
But since this book brings enabling philosophical conditions for architecture to
the fore, I make these comments to situate the goings-on in a larger picture of
ideas for that time.
As the positivist turn was happening in China, in Europe thinkers such as

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) were seeking
to bridge the Cartesian dualism of subject–object so that the two were returned
to a holism. This was a phenomenological turn in European ideas. Husserl’s
“intentionality of consciousness,” or Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” can be
diagrammed akin to Figure 1.3a. Thus we have a chiasm—a crossover—of
philosophical perspectives in China and Europe in the early twentieth century: the
ascent of phenomenology in the West, more in keeping with Figure 1.3a, with
the ascent of positivism in China, more in keeping with Figure 1.3b. Chiasm is
itself a term used by another phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908–1961), who integrated subject with object by saying that our human
embodied-ness, in perception, crosses over to our surroundings as “the flesh of the
world.”38
The flesh of the world. This notion should be held up in comparison with long-
standing Chinese philosophical tenets. From Daoism: “Therefore, if you act as if
your body is the world, you can entrust yourself with the world. If you love the
world as you love your body, you find the world inside you.”39 From
Confucianism: “The innate knowledge of man is the same as that of plants and
trees, tiles and stones. Without the innate knowledge inherent in man, there can
be no plants and trees, tiles and stones.”40 A chiastic impetus to cross the boundaries
between human body and surrounding cosmos had long been active in Chinese
thinking. For architecture, the previous chapters have suggested that this resulted
in a correlative unity of built structure with human experience such that the structure
itself is not an isolated focus of theory. Again, this lack of theoretical reflection
about architecture I call apperception. The presence of apperception results when human
being and cosmos are received as coterminous, and this state of affairs resonates
not only with centuries of Chinese philosophy, but also with the phenomenology
of the European thinkers cited above.
Phenomenology, then, can be understood as emphasis on an experiencing
subject’s immediate unity with a given context. Immediate experience cannot be
captured by propositions. If you are at the Grand Canyon or at the Great Wall,
and you take pictures to view later, the images fall far short of the immediacy of
being there. The experience itself is full-orbed. Well, it is zi4 ran2 (spontaneity,
or simply, “nature”). The experience itself is wu2 wei2 (non-action, or letting nature
flow through you). The experience itself “accomplishes, without having to act.”41
The experience itself is “vast, and resembles nothing . . . if it resembled anything,
it would, long before now, have become small.”42 To wit there is something
originary that any use of words degrades. Thus the Daodejing: “As soon as there
are names, one ought to know that it is time to stop.”43
Now, in Europe, phenomenology as it was propounded by the likes of Husserl
and Heidegger was concomitant with other developments such as logical positivism
and critical theory, so the overall outcome continued to be the complicated mix
of ideas that characterized European thought, let us say post the Renaissance.
98 Present
But in Chinese ideas, once the Cartesian split happened between experiencing
subject and the object(s) perceived, the perceiving subject became an evaluative
subject. It is not that the Eye/I in the correlative condition (Figure 1.3a) did not
evaluate things; it did. After all: “a million differences, none out of tune” is an
evaluation. But the kind of evaluation the Eye/I makes changed: separated from
the cosmos, the Eye/I evaluates propositionally by naming the various givens of the
cosmos such that, after fixing such propositions, the Eye/I is defined by an identity.
A million differences are no longer “none out of tune.” Some differences become
more in tune than others.
Propositional definition is in keeping with a positivist outlook. The outlook is
a progeny of Cartesian scepticism: “intelligent nature is distinct from the corporeal,
considering that all composition is evidence of dependency, and . . . dependency
is manifestly a defect.”44 The citation is from Descartes’s Discourse on Method of
Properly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, issued, again,
in 1637. The full title of the work is more informative than its more common
abridgement: Discourse on Method. The full title clarifies what Descartes’s under-
standing of “method” entails, to wit (1) human reason is necessary (2) to discover
truth, and (3) the entire process is the purview of the sciences. Other studies can
take this up, but I suggest that it is at this point in Greco-European ideas that the
conflation of the difference between facts and truths began. As for this present study,
the turn towards positivism in China had the following impacts on architecture.
Façade-ism
In the Greco-European tradition, a building’s façade has been the subject of
theoretical contemplation since Vitruvius. Surely façades were a theoretical concern
prior to Vitruvius. Surely the elevation of the Parthenon, for instance, did not result
from happenstance; the stone base, the entasis of the columns, the overall Doric
order of the frieze, architrave, pediment, and so on were all part of the classical
preoccupation with symmetria. The Roman incorporation of the three Greek Orders,
with innovations of two more, the Tuscan and Composite, betray similar theoretical
care. By J.N.L. Durand’s Precis of 1809, in which classical precedents were rejected
and buildings could be pieced together from a kit of parts, we see façades as diagrams
we can pick and choose from.45 Recall van Zanten’s point that the culminating
step in the Beaux-Arts design process was for the design to be “adjusted to flash
into three-dimensions as a pictorial manifestation of the originating idea.” The third
dimension, of course, was the elevation.
The architecture of China’s past was not animated by the idea of a façade; the
looks of its vertical aspect were an organic outcome of the post-and-beam fen4
unit system. Again, Zhao Chen held that historic Chinese architecture didn’t even
have façades in any Western sense—his teacher Liang Sicheng’s Beaux-Arts
convictions notwithstanding. Thus the idea of buildings needing façades is
something of a twentieth-century innovation in China; the notion is merely a
hundred years old, give or take a few decades. As I noted earlier, with the loss of
apperception came the awareness that Chinese buildings needed to be clothed. This
is the philosophical reason behind Rowe and Kuan’s categories. It explains the
appliqué quality of the building façades they describe.
In fact, some of the first façades on Chinese buildings were innovated by an
American architect from Connecticut, Henry K. Murphy, and his Canadian
competitor, Harry Hussey. Funded by American interests, the firms of Murphy
and Dana, and Shattuck and Hussey designed college campuses and missionary
schools in northern and southern China. Hussey designed the Peking Union Medical
College in 1921 (Figure 4.4b). Murphy was a consultant to the Nationalist Chinese
government, and a Chinese architect from his office, Cornell-trained Lu Yanzhi,
would go on to win the competition to design the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum in
Nanjing in 1925–1926 (Figure 5.7).
Murphy’s influence was palpable. He sought to integrate Chinese and Western
styles to foster what he considered an “adaptive Chinese renaissance.” This entailed
not just Chinese roofs, but also the body of the building. Western materials and
layouts were used, but elevations were clad to look Chinese. Jeffrey Cody notes
the irony that, for instance, at the Ginling College for Girls in Nanjing, buildings
were to be “Chinese throughout”—but built of reinforced concrete.46
When there is no lineage of theory informing what building elevations are, that
is, how they grow out of the ontological logistics of the structural, functional, and
material workings of a building, to suddenly insist on façades on buildings is unnatural
to how architecture had been conceived of for centuries. Thus modern Chinese
building elevations often remind of the aliens in the movie Men in Black, who need
to don human “skins” to make their way in this world; only the fit is never exactly
right. To invoke Simon again, artificial things “may imitate appearances in natural
things while lacking . . . the reality of the latter.”
In this light it is informative, if not somewhat unsettling, that the first world-
class museum in China, the Shanghai Museum, has a façade designed to look like
a ding3, an ancient Chinese cooking pot, complete with handles. Why? Well,
because no theoretical lineage informs it to be anything else. For China’s pavilion
of the 2010 Expo, held in Shanghai, the entire building takes on the shape of a
historic wood bracket, dou3 gong3 (Figure 4.5). Of course in the West there are
buildings built to look like dogs, bottles, wagons from the old American West,
and so on. But centuries of theory informing building elevations highlight these
tongue-in-cheek designs as tongue-in-cheek. The very reason we needed to “learn
from Las Vegas,” on Venturi’s view, was so that the European outlook could
be freed from centuries of theorizing deeper meanings into building façades.47 But
absent such a theoretical tradition, a prominent cultural building built to look like
a cooking pot is problematic—because it is a serious architectural effort. A building
shaped like an enormous ancient bracket is how China chose to represent itself
to the world in the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. This is what I mean by façade-ism.
It results in an urban bricolage of anything goes. It is an outcome of the peculiar
overlay of ideas diagrammed in Figure 4.3.
100 Present
FIGURE 4.5 China Art Museum (China Pavilion, 2010), Shanghai.
Buildings as Symbols
For our purposes, symbol is defined as an object or practice that takes on meanings
of much greater scope than the physical parameters of the object or practice itself
can contain. Symbols are thus connotative much more than they are denotative,
and they are common to all cultures: consider the Christian cross or the yin yang
diagram. What is significant for China after 1840 is that buildings, of all things,
had imposed upon them the burden of becoming symbols. What should this and
that building symbolize? Of course historic Chinese architecture had symbolic value.
The Forbidden City, as Kim Dovey has argued, was “an ideogram of the world,
of heaven and earth,”48 with the emperor as the Son of Heaven in residence. But
the symbolic meaning of the Forbidden City in its heyday was unreflective; the
Forbidden City was totalizing in its presence, and in this presencing its meaning
was not so much symbolic as it was actual. Perhaps the medieval notion of anagogic
meaning fits this sense of actual: when a penitent entered the cathedral, he or she
was not in a representation of heaven; he or she was in heaven. This is why the
rich and powerful of medieval Europe were buried in cathedrals: it assured their
place in heaven. But for symbols to work, the larger meanings they stand for—
those actualities—are instantiated in the physical objects in such a way that the
actualities themselves are still faraway, still abstract, still needing to be captured in
re-presentations. In this sense symbols work better in a Figure 1.3b cosmos (which
did not hold in medieval times in the way it does post-Descartes), in which the
Eye/I is by definition removed from the symbol it gazes upon. In contrast, the
traditional correlative outlook reduces a need for symbols; at least as it is defined
here. The Eye/I is present in the actuality itself (Figure 1.3a). And so Michael
Dutton notes that spirituality was “embedded” (his term) in daily life; the Chinese
“did not lack spirituality but lacked display . . . Traditional China, then, was the
land of a million churches, all of which were called home.”49
But the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square is symbolic.
Indeed, Tiananmen Square itself, its enormous size constructed to re-present the
new Communist regime, is symbolic.50 These structures, unlike the nearby
Forbidden City in its Ming and Qing heyday, are physical objects pointing to a
distant ideal. Wu Hung details the razing of historic structures to accommodate
Mao’s desire for a square that can accommodate a million people (the current square
still does not), and also the meticulous selection of the ideologically correct design
for the Monument.51 In true Figure 1.3b fashion, the theoretical ideal of a vast
people’s government, far removed from actual conditions, required symbols. As
well, the Great Hall of the People to the west, and the Museum of Chinese History
to the east, of the square, symbolize the grandeur of the new China. (Ironically,
their Soviet classicism also symbolizes how fledgling the new China was as it looked
to the “big brother” to the north for architectural cues in the 1950s.)52 All of this
betrays a key trait of early Chinese modernity: the angst of realizing that China
was not, after all, zhong1 guo2, the polity at the center of the cosmos. Instead it
was just one nation among nations; and many of them—even Japan—were stronger
(China lost a war to Japan in 1895, thanks to that nation’s earlier embrace of
European technology; and Japan invaded China again in the years 1937–1945).
Thus Liang Sicheng’s quest to define a “national Chinese architecture” was a quest
for symbolic meaning. Prior to Chinese modernity, it occurred to no one to search
for a “national architecture.” But once the Eye/I lost its apperceptive immediacy,
the pressure to define the meaning of a national domain, and to symbolize
meanings associated with that domain in buildings, was overwhelming.
The Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Chinese History are two of
the Ten Great Buildings (shi2 da4 jian4 zhu4) project of 1958–1959. To celebrate
the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the Mao
government decreed ten prominent buildings to be built in Beijing, all in one year.
The audacious initiative to build ten monumental structures instantly, as it were,
expressed the new regime’s ideology, to wit that the power of the people, when
motivated by revolutionary ideology, can do seemingly impossible things. The Ten
Buildings were nothing but symbolic productions. The other eight are the Beijing
Train Station, the Museum of Agriculture, the Military Museum, the Cultural Palace
of the Nationalities, the Overseas Chinese Hotel, the Minzu Hotel, the Diaoyutai
Guest House, and the Workers’ Stadium. These projects are all examples of
façade-ism. That they are also symbols of a new government “of the people” raises
concerns over the genuineness of the ideology. Wu Hung notes that their
102 Present
FIGURE 4.6 The Great Hall of the People, Beijing. This is one of the Ten Great
Buildings built in 1959.
monumentality is often skin deep: “Each building impresses the onlooker . . . But
(the) grand frontal image is disproportional to the building’s pitiful depth, and
disappears completely if one views the building from the side.”53 While Venturi
may have coined the notion of architecture as a decorated box, the Chinese were
engaging in the practice some two decades ahead of him.
The Proliferation of Yung

Another outcome of the loss of apperception is function. This is not the yung noted
above, neither in the sense of the metaphysical unity of ti-yung, as early Chinese
cosmology would have it, nor in yung’s dualistic relation to ti during the Qing
dynasty. Function here means something else: the tendency to conceive of any entity
as a mechanical assembly of parts, each part playing a role in that entity’s operation; the
role aspect is that part’s, and that entity’s, function. In the regime of the Machine, things
are not just things as such. All things—from utensils to governments—are mapped
onto an evaluative matrix of functions. What does a thing do? And what are the
components of that thing so it can do what it does? Prior to the Industrial
Revolution, buildings were not conceived of in this functionalistic way, neither
in Europe nor in China. The logic behind Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, for example,
was the organic symmetria of pure geometries infused into the building to make it
an organic body. Earlier, the flying buttresses of the Gothic cathedrals were an
analogy of human arms held out to steady the frame, while the frame itself
expressed mystical proportions. But we have already mentioned Durand’s new
direction in 1809. Gone is the building as holistic body; the building became a kit
of parts. A line can be drawn from Durand’s kit of parts to Le Corbusier’s
formulation that a house is a machine for living in.
Now, it is in the nature of the Machine to proliferate functions. This is not only
because the very nature of industrial technology innovates mechanical extensions
of the human body, resulting in a plethora of new typologies: trains and steamships
for travel, telegraph and telephones for communication, endless varieties of
inventions for manufactures, and much more destructive armaments for war. More
fundamental than this is a way of thinking. Chinese modernity began when, all of
a sudden, China was confronted with comprehending culture itself as a kit of parts,
all now conceived of as mechanical functions. Architecturally speaking, in historic
China, the Confucian correlative cosmos was expressed in the relational structures
of the si4 he2 yuan4, the courtyard system. In this life-world, Daoist, Buddhist,
and Confucian compounds all took on the courtyard form. Indeed, all architectural
assemblages were courtyard assemblages: residences, neighbourhoods, and
governmental precincts. With respect to function, traits of this “pre” condition
are captured well by Jianfei Zhu:
weak or multiple programming of spaces (a temple was also a commercial

focus accommodating monthly festivals and other functions), and . . . constant
and flexible use of space by the population (a house compound can be turned
into a temple, a teahouse or restaurant can accommodate theatres), not to
mention the more amorphous use of streets and other outdoor spaces.54
It never occurred to anyone that every human activity had to be supported by

a unique physical form. But the Machine outlook itemizes all particulars in relation
to the operations of larger mechanisms. As existence itself becomes conceived of
as a technological operation, functions proliferate. In following suit, forms
proliferate as a means of accounting for these functions. In this regard it is important
to note that architecture serving the most pedestrian functions—for example, Soviet
workers’ housing blocks—can be imbued with deep symbolic value. Likewise, the
community kitchens of the people’s communes during Mao’s Great Leap Forward
in the late 1950s were functionalist in the most basic manner, and yet they were
a major symbol of the new Communist ideology. One might say that the Ten
Great Buildings, symbols though they are, were also in service to ten different
functions. What does a government seat look like? What does a building celebrating
Chinese minorities look like? What does a hotel look like? What does a railroad
station look like? These kinds of questions prior to Chinese modernity were not
even on the horizon. After modernity thrust itself upon the nation, they became
pressing concerns. The Beijing Railway Station, one of the Ten Great Buildings,
is one answer to what a train terminal may look like, but let’s make sure the “Chinese
hat” is on prominent display (Figure 4.7).
The proliferation of functions as the bases for the definition of forms also worked
at the urban scale. Joseph Esherick has noted that Chinese cities did not have
differentiated identities until the modern era, during which emerged the capital
city, interior city, tourist city, industrial city, railway city, and frontier city.55 Each
became a functional brand.
104 Present
FIGURE 4.7 Beijing Railway Station. This is another of the Ten Great Buildings built
in 1959. Yang Tingbao was a lead architect.
Scalar/Spatial Discontinuity
When buildings become singular objects of meaning in the Chinese modernist world
(Figure 4.3), there tends to be non-obvious, because nonexistent, rationale for how
one object relates to another. This is in direct opposition to past Chinese
architecture, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, was indexed to social hierarchies.
I am suggesting that, as Chinese modernity explicitly rejected Confucian
formulations of societal structure, it also set adrift implicit regulating rationales for
Chinese urban patterns. From the uniformity of form and scale in a place like pre-
1840 Beijing, Chinese cities today amount to eruptions of scalar differences, spread
out spatially in, well, in not any particularly unifying way.
For instance, the largest building in the world by floor area is now in Chengdu
(Figure 4.8). The Global Center is visible from afar as a “What is that?” in the ur-
ban landscape. The size of the Center sets it apart as a discontinuity from the
surrounding urban fabric. In the traditional correlative Chinese city, social relations
and social hierarchy expressed in architectural forms yielded, in Wu Liangyong’s
words:
unity and variety in the composition of architectural groupings . . . one finds

that palaces, temples, and houses are all composed of buildings of rather simple
forms and limited height. The rhythmic spatial composition of different

complexes of similar buildings created a regularity in silhouette.56
The loss of apperception changed this fabric. Wu’s Ju’er Hutong project (see
pages 72–73) in Beijing gestures to the past, but of course taken as a whole, China’s
urban profiles will never be like what they were. This seems obvious, but the
philosophical reason behind it is the loss of apperception.
One might say that the Ju’er Hutong resonates with New Urbanist sensibilities:
low-rise development, emphasis on communal courtyard spaces. But New
Urbanism stands in a long line of urban planning theory, all of it in relation to the
Machine: Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (1898) integrated mechanical
production with natural landscapes; Tony Garnier’s Industrial City (1917) innovated
zoned sectors to segregate production from housing. Frank Lloyd Wright’s lecture,
“The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901) integrated the mechanical into the
“texture and tissue” of the city conceived of as a living organism;57 Wright would
propose Broadacre City in the 1930s as a prescriptive (read: engineered) approach
to a democratized urban life. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier proposed his Voisin Plan
to raze parts of Paris to accommodate concrete residential towers. Although not
enacted in Paris, the functionalist spirit behind the Voisin Plan found expression
in many other cities, perhaps most famously in the Pruitt-Igoe subsidized housing
towers in St. Louis. These are a mere sampling of how Machine scale was woven
into the conception of urban fabrics of the Greco-European line of theorizing.
The key in situating New Urbanist theory in this same line of ideas, even though
it is an explicit reaction against “the city as a machine for living in,” is to see that
FIGURE 4.8 The Global Center, Chengdu.

106 Present
its prescriptions are themselves positivist measures. In this light, recent transect theory
is illustrative. Andrés Duany holds that the transect is “a natural law that can be
observed anywhere and everywhere,” including in Chinese scroll paintings.58 The
conception is one of strategically (or naturally, per Duany) tapering urban densities
to less dense rural massings over an extended section of developed land area. At
any rate, natural or not, this kind of theorizing about smooth transitions in scale
(as a proportioning exercise; see my argument in Chapter 3) is not evident in the
placement of the Global Center. As well, in the fabric of contemporary Beijing,
the Ju’er Hutong project is also an anomaly. Both the Global Center and the Ju’er
Hutong continue the line of urban design thinking based on patterns rather than
on proportions. When the social-hierarchical logic that informed historic Chinese
urban patterns is set aside, the new patterns become unpredictable and random.
What is left in the Chinese modernist conception is abstract space, within which
can be placed abstract single forms. There is guiding logic neither to the forms
nor to the space. Consider Orange County Beijing. This development, built to
look like Orange County in southern California, underlines the fact that scalar
discontinuity is more than a problem of out-of-scale buildings in the Chinese urban
fabric; it is also a problem of out-of-place developments in (what is now)
anonymous space. One might say that Orange County Beijing follows historic
Chinese city planning in that it is demarcated in its own walled precinct. But unlike
historic precincts, this walled zone is in the middle of nowhere, off the Airport
FIGURE 4.9 A neighborhood in Orange County, Beijing.

Road in Beijing. It is out of scale to the surrounding landscape. It is also out of

scale, of course, to anything philosophically Chinese. It is out of place in the
correlative reality that is (or was) China. The irony is that, because of the condition
described in Figure 4.3, it is a totally understandable state of affairs for contemporary
architecture in China.
Notes
1 1840 is the standard date for demarcating modern China. The year usually references
the beginning of the First Opium War, which actually began in 1839. For example, the
commemorative relief sculptures on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tianamen
Square, Beijing, begin with Burning Opium (1840). See the explanation of these relief
sculptures in Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political
Space (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 31–34.
2 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books,
1964), 4.
3 Ibid., 21–22.
4 Definition of “artifice” from Oxford Dictionaries, www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/
definition/american_english/artifice. Accessed March 7, 2015.
5 Herbert Simon, “The Natural and Artificial Worlds,” in Sciences of the Artificial
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5.
6 Limin Zheng, CCTV.com English, “Liang Sicheng – Father of Modern Chinese
Architecture”, http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/journeysintime/20110617/105582.shtml, accessed
March 7, 2015.
7 Zhao Chen, “Elevation or Façade: A Re-evaluation of Liang Sicheng’s Interpretation
of Chinese Timber Architecture in Light of Beaux-Arts Classicism,” in Jeffrey W. Cody,
Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts
(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 193–203.
8 Delin Lai, “Idealizing a Chinese Style: Rethinking Early Writings on Chinese
Architecture and the Design of the National Central Museum in Nanjing,” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 73:1 (March, 2014), 61–90.
9 David van Zanten, “Just What Was Beaux-Arts Architectural Composition?,” in W. Cody,
Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, Eds., op. cit., 23–24.
10 Jonathan Spence, “Foreword,” in Wilma Fairbank, Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring
China’s Architectural Past (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xi.
11 It suffices to support this view with a standard dictionary definition of the term: Positivism
is “a theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge
and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and
relations as verified by the empirical sciences.” Merriam Webster Dictionary,
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/positivism. Accessed February 16, 2016.
12 Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford
University Press, 2004), 119.
13 The two slogans were penned by Chen Duxiu, a political activist who later served as
the Dean of Humanities at Peking (Beijing) University. See ibid., 41–44, 119.
14 J. Thorley, “The Silk Trade between China and the Roman Empire at Its Height, circa
AD 90–130,” Greece & Rome, 2nd series, 18:1 (April, 1971), 71–80.
15 See Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (New
York: Ballantine Wellspring, 2001).
16 This point is made by Kenneth J. Hammond in his lecture “The Coming of the West”
(lecture #27) in From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History. The Great
Courses, www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/from-yao-to-mao-5000-years-of-chinese-
history.html. Accessed February 19, 2016.
108 Present
17 Jianfei Zhu, “Perspective as Symbolic Form,” in Architecture of Modern China: A Historical

Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 11–40.
18 See Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change
in Late Imperial China (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1984), 79–85.
19 Ann-ping Chin and Mansfield Freeman, “An Appraisal of Tai Chen’s Thought,” in Tai
Chen on Mencius: Explorations in Words and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990), 33.
20 Wing Tsit-Chan, “The Materialism of Wang Fu-Chih,” in A Source Book of Chinese
Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), 692–693.
21 But in her study of Wang, Alison Black holds that Wang’s emphasis on concrete materiality
was only in response to the rampant Daoist and Buddhist transcendentalism of the previous
Song and Ming dynasties. It may not have been any explicit advance towards materialism
in the later Marxist sense. Alison Harley Black, Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought
of Wang Fu-Chih (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1989), 212–213.
22 Wing Tsit-Chan, “K’ang Wu-Wei’s Philosophy of Great Unity,” in ibid., 724.
MA: MIT Press, 1985), 40, 72 cf.
24 See Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-
First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), 41–62.
25 Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/120626?redirectedFrom=mod
ernity#eid. Accessed February 11, 2015.
26 Rhoads Murphy, “The Treaty Ports and China’s Modernization,” in Mark Elvin and
G. William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford University Press,
1974), 21.
27 Ibid., 33. Murphy attributes the phrase “a sense of where you are” to Bill Bradley, “the
All-American basketballer”; see J. McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are (New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1965).
28 [Logical positivists] “have, however, the great merit that their method allows them to
tackle problems one by one, and that they are not obliged, as philosophers used to be,
to produce a complete theory of the universe on all occasions. Their procedure, in fact,
is more analogous to that of science than to that of traditional philosophy. In this respect
I am wholly at one with them.” Bertrand Russell, “Logical Positivism,” in
www.filosofia.org/aut/003/m49a1205.pdf, 1219. Accessed March 31, 2015.
29 James Scott Johnston, “John Dewey and the Role of Scientific Method in Aesthetic
Experience,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 21:1 (2002), 1–15.
30 Luke S.K. Wong, “The T’i-Yung Dichotomy and the Search for Talent in Late Ch’ing
China,” Modern Asian Studies 27:2 (May, 1993), 257.
31 See Joseph Levenson’s treatment of this duality, particularly how yung-utility cannot but
become a new essentiality as technological innovations proliferated in his book, Confucian
China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press, 1968), 59–78.
32 Luke S.K. Wong, op. cit., 258.
33 Ibid., 253, 257, 261–262, 268, 276.
34 Peter Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 56–87.
35 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A546/B574, 472.
36 See A108, ibid., 136.
37 Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford University Press, 1982), 11–21.
38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), 130–155.
39 Laozi, Dao De Jing 13, trans. Matsumoto. http://taotechingdecoded.com/TbM/1300.
html. Accessed February 11, 2016.
40 Wang Yangming, “Instructions for Practical Living” in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 685.
41 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 47 (Daodejing), trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin Books, 1963), 108.
42 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 67, ibid., 129.

43 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 32, ibid., 91.
44 René Decartes, “Discourse 4” in F.E. Sutcliffe, trans., Discourse on Method and the
Meditations (Penguin Books, 1980), 56.
45 J.N.L. Durand, Precis of the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research
Institute Publications Program, 2000).
46 Jeffrey W. Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935
(Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, and Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2001), 107–113.
47 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
48 Kim Dovey, “Hidden Power,” in Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (London
and New York: Routledge, 1999), 73.
49 Michael Dutton, “The Architecture of Life,” in Michael Dutton, ed., Streetlife China
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), 194. Italics added.
50 See Wu Hung, op. cit., 15–50.
51 Wu Hung, op. cit., 15–50.
52 K. Sizheng Fan, “A Classicist Architecture for Utopia: The Soviet Contacts,” in Jeffrey
W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., op. cit., 91–126.
53 Ibid., 118.
54 Jianfei Zhu, op. cit., 226.
55 Joseph Esherick, “Modernity and Nation in the Chinese City,” in Joseph Esherick, ed.,
Remaking the Chinese City (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 4–5.
56 Wu Liangyong, Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 13.
57 Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901). A copy of this lecture
is available at www.learn.columbia.edu/courses/arch20/pdf/art_hum_reading_50.pdf,
accessed April 29, 2015.
58 Andrés Duany, “Introduction to the Special Issue: The Transect,” Journal of Urban Design
7:3, 251–260.
5
CHINESE ARCHITECTURE
IN AN AGE OF
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Diary of a Madman was published in 1918 by Lu Xun (1881–1936), a progressive

writer who opposed anything related to the recently defunct Qing dynasty. The
Diary consists of a number of journal entries written by the younger of two brothers.
The entries were written when the younger brother was suffering from a mental
illness, although by the time the narrator makes these entries available to us, the
sick person had recovered and taken an “official post.” This of course means this
younger brother had some sort of Confucian bona fides, and had returned to work
in the civil service system. But during his illness, he was convinced that he was
living among cannibals: friends, senior citizens, even his older brother, ate people.
In fact his older brother had eaten his sister; and even though their mother cried,
she may not have realized exactly what had happened. We are just told that when
the older brother said children should cut off their flesh for their parents to eat
when the parents are ill, the mother did not object. This is one of many tip-offs
in Diary for Lu Xun’s point: Confucian culture destroys its own and had been
doing so for “four thousand years.”
Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it. In

ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather
hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and
scrawled all over each page are the words: “Virtue and Morality.”1
Diary of a Madman emerged out of the New Culture Movement, a profound

redirection in cultural outlook among intellectuals and the younger generation in
the 1910s. Confucian values were to be rejected as the new Chinese nation looked
to the West for cues on how to move forward. Veneration of ancestors,
subordination of women, social hierarchy with its li3 protocols, cultivation of arcane
classical writing—in short, the totality of Confucian ideals of virtue and morality—
Chinese Architecture and Poststructuralism 111
all came under attack. Far from enabling a productive culture, Lu Xun equated
the Confucian system with cannibalism. That Diary of a Madman became one of
the most popular literary works of the early twentieth century in China underlines
the extent to which Chinese society was disillusioned with past ways.
Lu Xun’s essay reflects a larger, more global way of comprehending cultural
meaning that emerged at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century. It is (now) called structuralism, and it is one of the fundamental shifts
in cultural analysis to come out of the Industrial Revolution. Of course analysts
trace structuralism’s provenance to much earlier dates. Terence Hawkes, for
instance, suggests Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1774) “science of man” for the roots
of structuralism.2 This was when Western ideas began to look away from
transcendental sources to human beings’ own rational powers as the bases of
knowledge. Peter Caws cites Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) critical philosophy for
structuralist origins.3 Kant certainly held that knowledge comes only by the internal
workings of the human cognitive apparatus; “pure” reason is not predicated on
anything outside of innate human rational capacities. But structuralism’s view that
meaning only arises when Xs and Ys are placed in certain relations to each other
is congruent with an unreflective way of seeing made hegemonic by the Machine:
operational coherence results from the relational workings of a discreet assemblage
of parts. In short, meaning is only meaningful within an immanent system; the
implicit emphasis is upon functionality. Nothing beyond or outside the system
(nothing transcendent) contributes to meaning. Armed with this framework, an
analyst can diagnose large cultural systems—Confucian society, for instance—as an
immanent network of signs, that is, as comprised of a vocabulary. All participants
within the system are assessed as signs, and they behave normatively according to
the relational dictates of the system; relative to them, nothing is amiss. Only when
one steps outside of Confucianism (or any other cultural system) can an assessment
of its internal workings be “objectively” grasped. In Diary, Lu Xun gives the younger
brother this external view. For this he is regarded as a madman by those within
the normative Confucian system. And for Lu Xun and the audience who welcomed
his essay, the tragedy is that this madman “recovered” and returned to an official
post, unable to break free of Confucianism’s cultural limitations.
As we saw in the previous chapter, modern Chinese architecture emerged in
the midst of this radical rejection of Confucian values, even as the need to retain
“Chineseness” never went away. This tension created a gaping space within which
puzzling over what Chineseness meant became fair game for all sorts of ideas.
Chinese modernity, then, is characterized not by a coherent design vocabulary,
but in its very nature is comprised of hybrid design vocabularies. In this chapter
I assess this condition through structuralist and, more importantly, poststructuralist
lenses. At a structuralist level, the hybrid vocabularies make it difficult to discern
a clear divide between modernist and postmodernist “looks” in architecture (Figure
5.5). Thus the poststructuralist aspect assesses the institutional powers that motivate
hybrid vocabularies as competing vocabularies. Again, we are dealing with a “present”
with a terminus a quo of the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, and
112 Present
FIGURE 5.1a Customs House, Hankou, Wuhan. This edifice was built in 1924 in
Hankou and even today commands a view of the river. Germany,
France, Russia, and Great Britain all had concession areas in Hankou.
Since its establishment in the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese
customs system has been staffed mostly by foreign nationals.
a terminus ad quem of the present day. The last chapter considered the impact
of positivism on the Chinese correlative view vis-à-vis architectural praxis. Pro-
liferating functions, and façades to dress them in—these were theoretical concerns
newly brought on by the positivist mindset of the Machine. But the overlay of
the yung4 of foreign technology upon the ti3 of the Chinese moral-organic social
fabric is only an entry point to comprehending Chinese architecture of the present
day. At this level, a diagram of Chinese modernity such as Figure 4.3 can seem
inert. But of course at the level of actual historical events this was far from the
case. It is difficult for readers in the West (I am thinking particularly of American
readers) to imagine sectors of your own city simply cordoned off from you, and
given over to a different, technologically much more dominant cultural system,
in which you have access only by permission. Whatever trauma this caused,
certainly it placed very different elements of design culture right next to each other
(Figures 5.1a and b). Grasping ideological shifts brought on by tumultuous events—
or perhaps tumultuous events brought on by competing ideologies—is key to
understanding the dynamic nature of modern architecture in China. Poststructuralist
tools help us in this effort.
FIGURE 5.1b St. Joseph’s Church, 1876, built in the British Concession in Hankow
(Hankou), now part of Wuhan. From the mid-nineteenth century
through the 1920s, Hankow was home to the concessions of many
foreign nations, including Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia.
Even today, St. Joseph’s is where “locals can have Western-style
wedding ceremonies.”
Source: “Largest Catholic Church in Wuhan,” Changjiang Weekly, December 5, 2014. file:///C:/Users/
davewang/Dropbox/PCA%20progress%20work/Changjiang%20Weekly,%20Catholic%20church%20in
%20Hankou.pdf. Accessed February 20, 2016.
I conclude this chapter with an appraisal of the poststructuralist impact on

architectural theory, specifically in the form of critical theory. Critical theory is
currently a preferred approach for theorizing Chinese architecture. Jianfei Zhu
devotes two chapters of his Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique to
criticality.4 The word “critique” in his title also resonates with this agenda, situating
his entire book within the criticalist domain. Guanghui Ding’s “Experimental
Architecture in China” surveys issues of the influential Tonji University-based
journal Shidai Jianzhu (Time + Architecture) “in which editors and contributors
collectively formulated a critical ideology of experimental architecture.”5 Examples
of assessing contemporary Chinese architecture through the lens of “criticality”
abound. I will explain the philosophical sources for criticality, and their resonance
with poststructuralism. My appraisal outlines some concerns about this direction
for Chinese architecture moving forward. So my appraisal will serve as an
introduction to Chapters 6 and 7.
114 Present
Looking for an Architectural Vocabulary

When Liang Sicheng penned “Why Study Chinese Architecture?” in 1944, his
argument was linguistically based:
We need to re-examine the structural logic of old architecture, just as those

who are devoted to new literature need also to understand the structure and
grammar of classical Chinese . . . Another indispensable step in our study is
to understand the laws of traditional construction technology. To do so is
as necessary as studying the vocabulary and grammar of a country’s language
before trying to appreciate its literature.6
We have already noted that Liang’s view of a linear Chinese architectural history
had European roots. That Liang also viewed Chinese architecture as having a
grammar also reflects European sources. John Summerson’s The Classical Language
of Architecture, issued in 1963, is similar in this regard. 7 For Summerson, the Classical
Orders function like a language; just as each speaker of a language uses common
words in unique ways, each architect’s use of the Orders also results in original
designs. For his part, Liang championed the idea that historic Chinese imperial
architecture also possessed an “order” in the classical sense.8 And this order is
essentially conceived of in terms of syntactical relations.
By the time Liang, and certainly Summerson, were promoting their linguistically
based theories, the notion that meanings of any kind are necessarily comprised of
vocabularized structures was embedded in how many thinkers approached their
topics. Earlier headwaters notwithstanding, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is
typically recognized as the innovator of this structuralist way of seeing. Saussure’s
dates roughly span from the Second Opium War to the collapse of the Qing dynasty
in 1911. So as the historically immanent correlative view was unraveling in China
by the imposition of European ideas, among those ideas was a new immanent view
of reality that would, whether explicitly or implicitly, impact Chinese thinkers such
as Lu Xun.
Saussure evolved a theory of signs to the effect that the semiotic values of all
signs depend on their relation to other signs. For example, the reason why English
speakers know the meaning of “cat,” but would reject “zat” as a misspelling, is
because the sign “cat” stands in an intricate web of relations to other signs that
together comprise the English langue, that is, the language’s overall system of
meaning. This complex web of signs is instantly (structuralists would say
synchronically) manageable by all fluent speakers of English. This competence is in
fact what makes them fluent. As soon as you say “zat,” I will reject it as an incorrect
parole (a single instance of the langue), because it is not relatable to anything in the
backdrop of all possible signs of the English langue. And in the time it takes you
to read this paragraph, you comprehend my meaning because these word-signs are
arranged such that they make sense diachronically (over a lapse of time) against the
backdrop of all possible signs in the English langue. To extend the illustration further,
as soon as I say mao1 (cat in Chinese) I lose some English speakers because, for
them, mao is just as “incorrect” as zat. In Lu Xun’s Diary, on the same logic, the
younger brother is as incorrect in the Confucian system as zat is incorrect in the
English language; hence he was perceived as a madman.
Structuralism, then, holds that meaning is not ontological; it is purely relational.
On this move alone Saussure’s posthumously published Course in General Linguistics
(1916) radically changed how language itself is understood. If language is not
FIGURE 5.2 René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933.

116 Present
essentialist, then the world it conveys is also not essentialist. Prior to Saussure,
language can be likened to a clear window enabling us to see outside of our
subjective enclosures, accurately depicting the world “out there.” But Saussure’s
theory suggests that language does not allow us to see beyond the window at all,
because language is itself the window. If meaning comes only by the relational structures
of signs—and Saussurian structuralism holds that all signs are themselves arbitrary—
then we really cannot see beyond the window of meaning created by those sign-
relations. René Magritte’s 1933 painting The Human Condition (Figure 5.2), in which
a painting of a window is overlaid on an actual window, so that what we see is
the world depicted on the painted window rather than the “real” world is, well,
it is the human condition as structuralism would have it. Put another way: human
beings do not make use of language to comprehend the world; instead, human
being itself is constructed by language.
Now, Saussure himself was swimming in the larger cultural soup of his day; in
this regard, even he can be regarded not as the originator of a structuralist view
of reality de novo, but rather as perhaps the one who reified it into a theory of
meaning generation. An array of thinkers whose dates fall roughly around Saussure’s
all have in common the analyses of their areas of concern as immanent systems of
related signs. Thorstein Veblen, the University of Chicago sociologist who
theorized society as a system of dynamically related classes, with the “leisure class”
on top—it was Veblen who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe
the key trait of members of the leisure class9—was born the same year as Saussure,
1857. Émile Durkheim, who promoted sociology as its own scientific discipline,
held that society can be analyzed as the immanent push–pull of “social facts,” which
define but also constrain all behaviour. Durkheim was born one year after Saussure
(1858). John Dewey (1859–1952), the American pragmatist philosopher who,
as we have already noted, was actually in China during the May 4, 1919
demonstrations, and who was well received by the New Culture Movement, was
born two years after Saussure. In his political philosophy, Dewey is favourable to
the notion that “men are not isolated non-social atoms, but are men only when
in intrinsic relations to one another.”10 Karl Marx himself was born in Saussure’s
birth year, 1857. His materialist theory of society moving through a series of
immanent stages by means of class conflict—for instance, the relational dynamic
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—would fundamentally define much
of twentieth-century history, influencing, among many others, the young Mao
Zedong (1893–1976). By the time of the emergence of critical theory in the 1930s,
any Hegelian transcendental element in Marx’s system would be rejected by
thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno or, more recently, Jürgen
Habermas. Again, I address the architectural implications of critical theory below.
The benefit of structuralist analysis is that it can powerfully map any system of
cultural meaning as a set of meaningful relational constructs. For instance, Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) would apply Saussure’s theory to diagnoses of family
structures and, beyond this, to the structure of myths. In the design literature, the
title of Christopher Alexander’s well-known work, A Pattern Language, speaks for
itself vis-à-vis its linguistic rationale: given correctly patterned built environments,
“we have a general sense that something is ‘right’ there; something is working;
something feels good.”11 Or again: Hillier and Hanson’s Social Logic of Space
interprets cultural meaning by assigning relational values to spatial proximities. This
is essentially a structuralist logic.12 But structuralism also has limitations because it
tends to reduce any system of meaning to a set of arbitrary signs that just happen
to be meaningful to denizens within the system. In fact the denizens themselves
are reduced to the status of arbitrary signs. As Lu Xun illustrates in Madman,
individuals participating in the Confucian system may think they are practicing
morality and virtue when, under critical assessment, they are actually destroying
each other. But how such a culture can last “four thousand years”—and hence be
one of the longest standing cultures in the world—Lu Xun does not say.
All of the above applies to us as follows: a key trait of modern Chinese
architecture is that it is an architecture looking for a vocabulary. This was true at the
beginnings of the modern period for China; it remains true today. This makes
modernism in China different from its European counterpart, in which we can
trace a historical line of conceiving of buildings as syntactical compositions. In the
late Renaissance, Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554) already began to categorize the
five Classical Orders as patterns that can be copied.13 In this way Serlio separated
the Orders from their organic moorings in symmetria and made them more
regulating patterns (read: vocabularies) that designers can use. This view of the
Orders would later largely be Summerson’s view. But it was the Industrial
Revolution in England in the mid-eighteenth century, along with the French
Enlightenment of the same period, that instilled a mechanistic view of the universe
that profoundly impacted architectural theory in the West. At this time, both
England and France saw the rise of “encyclopedias” that attempted to capture “the
arts, sciences, and crafts” as a complete array of categories of knowledge.14 The
point is that knowledge itself began to be viewed as a system of related parts. In
these encyclopedias are illustrations of the Classical Orders, now shown not even
in Serlio’s complete base-to-cornice arrangement, but as parts and pieces (Figure
5.3a). It is no surprise that J.N.L. Durand’s (1760–1834) Precis of Lessons on
Architecture conceives of buildings as comprised from a kit of parts that can be fitted
together syntactically.15 So by the time of Le Corbusier’s (1887–1965) five elements
of modern architecture—the building raised on pilotis, the open plan, the free façade,
the strip window, and the roof garden—conceiving of architecture as comprised
of a vocabulary had the backing of a long theoretical pedigree. Le Corbusier’s five
elements are perhaps best exemplified by the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931
(Figure 5.3b).
Now, the Wuhan University Library, in Wuhan, China, designed by the
American architect F.H. Kales, was built at the same time as the Villa Savoye. From
a distance the library recalls traditional forms. But up close we see that the
construction, down to the dou3 gong3 brackets under the eaves, is in concrete. In
short, when European theory penetrated to the essential ontology of architectural
modernism by drawing on the essentiality of the Machine, architects in China were
118 Present
FIGURE 5.3a Architectural components in Cyclopædia, an Universal Dictionary of Arts

and Sciences, James and John Knapton, vol. 1, 1728.
FIGURE 5.3b Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier.

adorning their important buildings with concrete dou gong. This difference is
profound. If theory seeks to plumb the essential underpinnings of a culture’s sensus
communis (its communal sense) to express those percolations in physical form, then
one of the desires of the Chinese sensus communis during the modern era was to
achieve Chineseness by costume. There was no Le Corbusier promoting the
Machine aesthetic: “eyes that do not see!” There was no Loosian harbinger crying
in the wilderness: “Ornament is Crime!” There was no philosophical basis to discern
a moral gap between physical forms as authentic expressions of the times, and
physical forms that merely mimic the looks of other times, even if it all must be
done with materials of an entirely different nature.
Besides mimicking elements from its own past, modern Chinese architecture
also mimics elements from other places. As we saw, early on there was the
importation of the “Western-style pavilions” (xi1 yang4 lou2, Figure 4.2) in
Beijing. But the same need to bring architecture from afar was apparent at the
2000 Beijing Olympics, when an array of new buildings designed by Western “star-
chitects” were on display: the Grand National Theatre by Paul Andreu, and of
course OMA’s CCTV (Figure 6.9). The appeal of the West has been an undeniable
force for architecture in China throughout the modern period. The first Western
architecture brought to China in quantity were the buildings that housed trade
and various administrative functions in the treaty port concession areas (Figure 5.1a).
Christian missions in the early twentieth century were another motivator for
architectural hybridity. How to present the Christian gospel in Chinese dress? Jeffrey
Cody has delineated a range of answers to this question, most of which involve a
mix of Chinese traditional architecture and various Western elements, either of
symbolism or of technology, or of both.16 (See Figure 5.5.)
Whether it was through the auspices of missions, or American philanthropy as
exemplified by the Rockefeller Foundation, architects such as Henry K. Murphy
from Connecticut, or the Canadian Harry Hussey, actively mixed Western and
Chinese motifs in their designs of campuses (Murphy’s Yale-in-China campus
in Changsha) and hospital facilities (Hussey’s Peking Union Medical College in
Beijing, Figure 4.4b). Murphy called his approach “adaptive architecture” and
regarded it as a step towards what he hoped would be a Chinese architectural
renaissance. In the 1930s Murphy was consultant to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist
government for a new city plan for the Guomindang’s capital, Nanjing.17 Much
of this Beaux-Arts-based plan was never realized due to the Japanese invasion of
1937 and the subsequent civil war between Chiang’s Guomindang and Mao’s
Communist forces. But before these conflicts, Lu Yanzhi, a protégé of Murphy’s
educated at Cornell, would win the competition for the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum
(1926, Figure 5.7). The axiality of the design, while it might evoke Chinese
monumental axes such as the one at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, actually
recalls The Mall in Washington, DC, anchored by the Lincoln Memorial. Rudolf
G. Wagner notes that Lu actually developed initial design concepts for the
mausoleum while in the United States.18 Evoking the faraway in architecture
continued after the unification of China under Mao in 1949. Soviet ideals early
120 Present
FIGURE 5.4a Wuhan University Library, 1920, F.H. Kales.
FIGURE 5.4b Wuhan University Library, concrete dou gong corner assembly.
FIGURE 5.5 Christian Salvation Hall, Hankou, 1931.
in the Maoist era in the 1950s also spurred appliqué-based thinking, as we see in
the Great Hall of the People (Figure 4.6).
At the vernacular level, classical appliqués can be seen on buildings in any city
in China. K. Sizheng Fan has noted that buildings with classical ornamentation
typically connote more prestige (see Figure I.1). Indeed, Chinese real estate pro-
moters sometimes pay Western architects to appear at media events just to imply
they were the designers of a promoted project.19 Today’s new wealth for the Chinese
urban population spurs new opportunities for travel. Entire city sectors dressed in
the formal vocabularies of faraway places is perhaps one way to travel abroad more
cheaply, as it were. In Wuhan, where I write much of this chapter, a Gothic
122 Present
cathedral anchors a piazza, in the midst of entire city blocks dressed up to look
like something German, something Spanish, something faraway. The cathedral is
an event center for weddings and such; my point is that it is not what it looks like
(Figure 5.6). And the precinct is called, appropriately, the Optics Valley.
In sum, while the vocabulary of modernist architecture in Europe grew out of
an organic unfolding of ideas, in China, the search for Chineseness made all formal
FIGURE 5.6 Event center designed as a medieval cathedral, Wuhan.

vocabularies negotiable, resulting in mix-and-match approaches. Thus from the

earliest days of the present period, there has been a postmodernist aspect, if by this
we mean borrowing formal quotations from other eras and places and admixing
them into single compositions (Figure 5.5). In the European line of development,
modernism and postmodernism are fairly distinct phases of modernity insofar as
architectural expressions are concerned. “Less is More” (Mies) is philosophically
different than “Less is a Bore” (Venturi). These slogans are clearly exemplified by
different kinds of architecture: the Farnsworth House (Mies) compared to the Vanna
Venturi House (Venturi). But such a divide is less clear in the Chinese case. This
observation differs from a more common notion that postmodernist architecture
in China emerged in step with its appearance in the West, thus situating
postmodernist design with the Deng Xiaoping era beginning in the late 1970s.20
But this imposes a Western postmodernist calendar on how contemporary Chinese
architecture unfolded. The actual case is that hybridity in formal expressions came
earlier. And this underlines the fact that modern Chinese architecture has not yet
found its own vocabulary, because it has always been at the mercy of competing
institutional agendas.
Chinese Architecture in an Age of Poststructuralism

Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman is a critique of the Confucian cultural system. The
structuralist aspect, that is, relations between parents and children, between older
and younger siblings, and so on, is taken for granted. The focus is rather on
Confucianism as a political paradigm that enforces meaning. There is therefore a
flip side relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism. Once a system
of relational signs is in place, the meanings they generate, and hence the institutional
power they wield, can be critiqued as an arbitrary reality. What maintains cultural
reception of a set of normative relational constructs? Poststructuralists will answer
it is institutions, e.g. political parties, the entertainment industry, the media,
religious organizations, and certainly New Youth, the journal that first published
Diary of a Madman. The list can be endless. For critical theorists (of which more
later), the critique is against capitalism. In China’s case, Confucianism is a social
institution wielding enormous power. The starting points of poststructuralist
critique, then, are almost always institutionalized power structures. These institu-
tions are either affirmed, or, more often, they are critiqued as oppressors of human
freedom. For example, when Daniel Libeskind held that aesthetic taste is merely
a form of “acquired censorship,”21 this was a poststructuralist move. He is saying
that certain cultural standards have been so commonly accepted that people do not
realize they have been habituated to have taste only in prescribed ways. Resistance
against these powers that define meaning is the reason why poststructuralist
literature is filled with words such as “emancipation,” “interrogation,” and the like.
Lu Xun’s essay interrogated Confucianism.
“Discourse” is another term used in poststructuralist analyses. Since cultural ways
of seeing and doing are only immanently meaningful, are composed of arbitrary
124 Present
signs, and are controlled by institutional powers, each of these self-contained units
is regarded as a discourse. To call such a state of affairs a discourse explicitly
recognizes its workings while implicitly acknowledging the impossibility of any
definitive answers to the problems the discourse raises. This is because definitive
answers presume authorial sources of definition external to that discourse.
Discourses are themselves arbitrarily created by the power structures enforcing them.
“Regimes” is therefore yet another word used to describe daily life within these
discursive venues. There are no overarching explanations for why discourses are
the way they are. Poststructuralism eschews explanations of origin; it simply deals
with cultural conditions as they present themselves. The rejection of overarching
explanatory frameworks is captured by Jean-François Lyotard’s “incredulity towards
metanarratives.” There are no such metanarratives; there are only localized realities.
For example, in writing of how “design intelligence” must work in these relativized
venues, Michael Speaks puts it this way: “Philosophical, political and scientific
truth[s] have fragmented into proliferating swarms of ‘little’ truths appearing and
disappearing so fast that ascertaining whether they are really true is impractical if
not altogether impossible.”22
This is poststructuralist thinking. Lyotard’s celebrated moniker comes from his
The Postmodern Condition.23 So this is one of many ways to discern the
poststructuralist roots of postmodernism; the former is the philosophical basis for
the latter. In his The Story of Postmodernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical,
Charles Jencks pairs Lyotard with Robert Venturi (of Complexity and Contradiction
in Architecture) to underline how postmodernist design theory allows for
“contradictory propositions to be asserted at the same time.”24 Jencks then cites
James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart as an exemplar of postmodernist
design, in that it displays “five or six styles orchestrating different moods.” The
way Stirling and Wilford “handled the variety of taste-cultures” was, for Lyotard,
“a war on totality.”25
But this is the difference between postmodernism in European architecture and
in the Chinese case. Jencks has been writing on postmodern design for decades,
as his recent book title attests. This is to say that, in the West, postmodern hybridity
is itself something of a self-conscious intentionality. My earlier point is that the
Chinese case displayed hybrid “codes” in its buildings—indeed, was “decorating
boxes” with concrete dou qong—much earlier than the emergence of postmodern
design in Europe, and that this hybridity was not a self-conscious design choice
motivated by a fascination with diversity. It was instead the result of conflicts in
ideological streams amidst a turbulent array of events each of which strived to be a
metanarrative. The hybridity arose amidst the coming to awareness of an entire culture
grappling with a “scientific” present and a natural–social–moral correlative past.
Given the absence of a tradition that theorized about buildings as removed objects
of contemplation, each competing worldview brought its architectural vocabulary
to the table. It is worthwhile to briefly review some of the events within which
modern Chinese architecture emerged.
In China, the decades leading up to the collapse of the Qing in 1911 witnessed
the Taiping Rebellion, a Sino–French war, a war with Japan, and the Boxer
Rebellion. All of this was amidst the complex relations with Western powers as
exemplified by the treaty ports, where Chinese law did not pertain. And all of this
was in the midst of internal pressures for political reform, for which Liang Sicheng’s
father, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), was a leading advocate. At the collapse of the
so-called Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, the older Liang barely escaped China
with his life, which is why the son was born in Japan. This only brings us to 1900.
After the Qing collapse, the first attempt at a republic failed quickly because the
new president, Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), tried to make himself emperor in 1915,
one year before he died. The ideological tensions of these years should be kept in
focus: a failed attempt to return to dynastic rule while, at the same time, the
beginnings of the New Culture Movement stirring widespread opposition to old
Confucian values.
It was during this period that the campus plan for the Yale-in-China College
and Hospital, in Changsha, was designed by the New York firm of Murphy
and Dana, in 1913. This project exemplifies one of the institutional structures
wielding power in China at this time: American philanthropy, embodied by
missionary organizations as well as university extensions such as Yale’s efforts. The
philanthropist Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines and himself born
in China as the son of Christian missionaries, also funded the development of
infrastructure in China. For the Changsha project, Cody describes how the design
committee’s wish for expressing Chinese architectural heritage while “embodying
the most modern American ideas” produced “the curious result . . . [of] a campus
that evoked mixed stylistic signals.” It was a campus where buildings connoting
Chinese “history” (Cody’s parenthesis)—among them, curiously, the Chapel—
coexisted with professors’ houses done in American Colonial Revival.26
At any rate, one downside of Yuan’s demise in 1916 was that it opened the
way for regional warlords to once again divide China, to massive disillusionment.
How to bring China into the twentieth century as a nation among nations? One
answer came from the north. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a profound
impact on progressive Chinese thinkers—even as American philanthropy was
funding infrastructure. Hardship experienced by the peasantry under landlords, anti-
foreign sentiment, Qing economic and political impotence—these all somehow
blended together to make Marxism-Leninism seem like a standard to emulate.27
For its part, Russia also wanted protection from an expansionist Japan, while it
hoped the Chinese situation would evolve in ways that would ratify its political
worldview. Russia sent advisors; and the Chinese Communist Party was formed
in 1921 in Shanghai. Even though the CCP was not a major force in these early
years, many progressives who would later play major roles were involved. Mao
Zedong attended the initial formation of the CCP. The founding members, Li
Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, were both active in the New Culture and May Fourth
Movements. Li, librarian at Peking University, was among the first to hail the
Bolshevik Revolution; Mao was a young worker in Li’s library.28 Chen Duxiu
126 Present
was the founder of the journal New Youth; it was he who called for a culture based
on “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.” But lest we think that democracy meant
for Chen what it might mean for the person on the street in the United States,
Chen also sponsored a full translation of the Communist Manifesto.29 So it is not
surprising that when the Mao regime came to power in 1949, the first period of
state-sponsored building looked to the Soviet Union for direction. And this was
against the brand of Beaux-Arts design that Liang Sicheng brought from the United
States. Liang would struggle between Soviet classicism and Beaux-Arts classicism
all his life. Soviet ideology also impacted Chinese city planning. K. Sizheng Fan
has noted that “more than 150” Chinese cities under the early CCP regime were
patterned after Soviet practices of centralizing the supply and management of
housing, and clearing old neighborhoods for industry.30
But all through the early years of the twentieth century, the person who many
regarded as the true national leader, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), variously kept himself
in exile while seeking to overthrow the warlords. Sun was more of a theoretician
and fundraiser, less a political wheeler-dealer. (He served as the provisional president
of the new republic prior to Yuan Shikai, but agreed to step down to accommodate
the latter’s rise.) Sun’s “three principles” of government—nationalism, power based
on the people, and the people’s welfare—still form the basis of government in
Taiwan, although he is also revered in China. But Sun died in 1925. It was Chiang
Kai-shek (1887–1975), military leader under Sun’s Guomindang party, who in 1927
led the Northern Expedition military campaign that brought about a fragile
national unity, at least in the Nanjing region. The years 1927–1937 saw relative
peace as Chiang’s government consolidated rule; this short-lived time is called the
Nanjing Decade. But aside from persistent warlordism further afield, Chiang faced
two problems. First, Japan’s expansionist policies, which had troubled China since
the late Qing years and through Yuan Shikai’s abortive reign, would flare up into
war again in 1937. Second, while Sun was largely friendly with the CCP, Chiang’s
relationship with the Communists was much more volatile. While joining with
them several times for such exigencies as obtaining Soviet aid and fighting the
Japanese, Chiang ultimately broke with the Communists in 1926–1927, when he
brutally purged Communist workers’ unions and their sympathizers in Shanghai.
Mixed political posturing is reflected in mixed architectural messaging as well.
Consider the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the most significant edifice of Chiang’s
Nanjing Decade. By this time there was a need to elevate Sun as a political icon
for the new nation. Wagner notes the mixed codes this single project had to
accommodate. The competition committee directed that the project reflect “old
Chinese forms, but [it must also] . . . create a new style based on the Chinese
architectural spirit.”31 The result was a Chinese-looking masonry structure that had
“no Chinese precedent.” It was rejected by “many young Chinese intellectuals
involved in the New Culture and May Fourth Movements . . . as feudal and
antiquarian.”32 Meanwhile, “the person to be permanently lying in state” in this
mausoleum:
was not a Cantonese Baptist or a revolutionary always in search of funds,

but a transnational linguistic hybrid, “Mr. Sun Zhongshan, the Founding
President of the Republic of China,” a title where all the elements, from
“Republic” to “President” to “Mr.” to the revolutionary pseudonym
“Zhongshan” were part of a new international nationalist rhetoric.33
All of this gives a sense of the complex dynamics within which modern Chinese
architecture emerged. If one suspects that the design of buildings may not have
been top of the agenda during these years, but rather “just happened” during more
pressing exigencies, it would probably be a correct assessment. There was no time
to muse about what architecture should be, no time for this question to percolate
through various theoretical spin cycles in the midst of a stable cultural venue.
Consider Marc-Antoine Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture (1753), written about
the same time as the construction of the Western-style pavilions in Beijing (Figure
4.2). Laugier’s image of a reclining muse languidly pointing to the primitive hut
as the Platonic ideal for architecture moving forward has no corollary in China.
Perhaps Liang Sicheng was China’s Laugier; but his entire life was dogged by political
upheavals beyond his control—he wasn’t even able to publish his Pictorial History
of Chinese Architecture without Norma Fairbank’s dedicated efforts after he passed
from the scene. Fairbanks spent years searching for Liang’s manuscript as China
FIGURE 5.7 Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Nanjing.

128 Present
went through the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 (the manuscript was lost
between 1957 and 1978).34 Fairbanks’s search is a parable of the entire project of
searching for what modern architecture in China might be. Whatever it is, it seems
always lost in the larger exigencies of a young polity coming into awareness of
itself, for the first time, as a nation among nations.
Figure 5.8 maps a timeline of the period within which present-day Chinese
architecture emerged. To say no more, it is a tumultuous period. In the midst of
everything, I list key architectural projects identified by alphabetical letters. I also
list some specific state policies enacted during this period, identified by numbers.
These latter developments, along with their dates, are drawn from Professor Xiao
Hu’s 2009 doctoral dissertation, Reorienting the Profession: Chinese Architectural
Transformation Between 1949 and 1959.35 Again, the political turbulence of the period
that produced present-day Chinese architecture should be apparent.
With the uniting of China under Mao in 1949, state control of architectural
practice began in earnest. For instance, by the end of 1952 private enterprises in
the construction sector had declined to a mere 1.7 percent (from 35 percent
in 1949).36 Government-run “design Institutes” were innovated, in which party
cadres co-led operations with professionally trained architects. All design and
construction answered to the party apparatus. In 1951, the CCP began a Thought
Reform Campaign to bring intellectuals, including architects, in line with Party
ideology. Hu cites Liang Sicheng himself writing during this period:
Most Chinese architects learned architecture from the West . . . We have

worked in design for satisfying (our) desires and earning our profits . . . Having
studied socialist theories and (being) helped by Soviet advisors, we have begun
to recognize that all designs should serve the people, taking care of their
needs and acknowledging the ideological meaning of architecture.37
Who knows what Liang was actually thinking when he wrote this? We know
that he would undergo public correction and ridicule during the Cultural
Revolution, as did many Western-trained intellectuals. Years later, Liang’s second
wife would say this:
He wrote confession letters, one after another, but didn’t know what he had
done. The most important claim was that he had received a “capitalist
education.” No one could tell us what proletarian architectural design was—
and you were too afraid to ask.38
Architects were among the direct targets of the Anti-Rightest Campaign,

begun in 1957, which suppressed the freedom to criticize the CCP. This followed
right after the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which had encouraged critique of
the CCP. During the Hundred Flowers phase, intellectuals were encouraged to
speak their minds, so architects spoke out against Russian classicist formality and
the oppressiveness of answering to political cadres rather than to trained architects.
FIGURE 5.8 Timeline of modern events and important architectural benchmarks.

130 Present
But during the Anti-Rightest Campaign, those who spoke out, and even some
who didn’t, were demoted or sent to the countryside to plant trees.39 By the time
of the Ten Great Buildings of 1959 (see Chapter 4), one can imagine how the
architecture community must have been pliant to the state’s dictates.
What of architecture since 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping came to power and
liberalized China’s economy? My own travels to China began in 1988. Since then
I have lost count how many times I have traveled and lectured in the country.
Suffice it to say that, by the mid 1990s, one could come to Beijing or Shanghai
each year, and the changes in infrastructure and urban fabric would be palpable
each time. In 1988, I recall standing in front of the Peace Hotel along Shanghai’s
Bund, and looking across the Huangpo River to the Pudong side. At that time,
what I saw was a strip of undeveloped land. One of my enduring regrets is not
being able to find the photograph I took of that barren view. But Figure 5.9 is
taken from the same spot in 2015. The magnitude of economic development in
China since the 1980s, and how this boom is reflected in urban environments, is
staggering. As I said in the Introduction, one has to see it to believe it. Even as I
write this, the New York Times reports on China’s plans for a “supercity” linking
the Beijing-Tianjin region by high-speed rail, transforming it into an urban area
the size of Kansas, and accommodating 130 million people. That’s one third of
the US population.40 The focus of the article is Yanjiao, a bedroom suburb to
Beijing; Yanjiao itself boasts a population of 700,000. Here, high-rise towers march
into the distance, but with little infrastructure to support the resident population:
no parks, no cinemas, limited transportation, and streets that flood every time it
rains because of poor drainage.
Yanjiao is more representative than Pudong of problems facing China’s
burgeoning urban areas. Infrastructure cannot keep up with urban expansion. What
we are witnessing are the ideas of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” expressed
in an orgy of construction that seems unconstrained by a developed sense of overall
urban cohesion. Buildings and developments act like bits and pieces of a
kaleidoscope view not yet resolved. In Chapter 3, I noted the tendency to express
urban planning in terms of patterns rather than (overall) proportions. This patterning
continues today, with the in-between areas of urban developments not contributing
to an overall sense of urban proportion. For instance, high-rise residential structures
under construction in Hankou, once the foreign concession area of Wuhan,
FIGURE 5.9 Shanghai Pudong viewed from the Bund in 2015.

FIGURE 5.10 High-rise residential towers under construction in Hankou, Wuhan.
abruptly pierce through an urban fabric that still sports alleyways like those in
European cities. The slenderness ratios of these towers are breathtaking; in their
thinness as they soar high into the sky, they remind one of chopsticks. Towers
such as the ones in Figure 5.10 are now so common in Chinese cities they can be
a new national symbol; this, in a correlative tradition that for centuries produced
the horizontal architectural ensembles resonant with community life.
Criticality and Its Discontents41

The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 was not an isolated event of its kind in
the world at that time. As mentioned earlier, 1917 brought the Russian Revolution.
That revolution was brought about in part by frustration over the Tsarist regime’s
failure in World War I, which spanned 1914–1918. In Germany, immediately after
its defeat, the monarchy fell when elements of the navy revolted, leading to workers’
organizations taking over governmental agencies. In short, in the early decades of
the twentieth century, an old order of things passed away. The early Chinese
communists were not the only ones looking to Russia with hopes of a new way
of life. Progressive thinkers in Europe were also very encouraged to hear of the
events in Russia; the rise of workers’ unions and self-governing soviets seemed
to be a fulfillment of Karl Marx’s vision of classless equality. But by the 1930s, the
optimism had faded somewhat, as the Bolshevik victory gave way to Stalin’s
132 Present
oppressive rule. With the ascendency of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy,
the disillusionment hardened. What went wrong with the Marxist model? This
question opened the way for reassessments of Marxism that came to be known as
critical theory.42 These include George Lukács’s early rejection of the Marxist notion
that history unfolds in predictable stages, to Theodor Adorno’s skepticism against
pure scientific objectivity in his Negative Dialectics, to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of
communicative action, which revisits the possibility of language to convey mutually
understandable meanings.43
Since its emergence, critical theory has had a significant impact on theory in
the social sciences, in history research, and on philosophy. This is not surprising,
in that critical theory is interdisciplinary, seeking new ways to maintain Marxist
ideals while critiquing Marxism’s limitations. Critical theory introduced a new way
of doing theory, which is by means of critique. Critique in this sense is not just
informed assessment of a given position. Critique here means active resistance against
an established regime (or regimen) in hopes of a better one. Commentators on
critical theory generally trace this tendency to Kant, whose three Critiques (of Reason,
of Practical Reason and of Judgment) systematically challenged the established
assumption that human cognition can “know” phenomena without critiquing the
structure of cognitive processes themselves.44 Critique moves theorizing from
comprehending what is, to comprehending what should be, by confronting what
is. This shift of theory to a criticalist-activist disposition is a fundamental coloration
of theory-making in the twentieth century. Indeed, critical theory has become so
influential that, in his overview written for the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, James Bohman distinguishes between the capitalized and non-
capitalized uses of critical theory,45 the latter denoting the plethora of theories bearing
the criticalist stamp. What is this stamp? The goal in the entire project of critical
theory is “emancipation.” This is a word used by one of the founders of critical
theory, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who was director of the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt, founded in the 1920s, better known as the Frankfurt School.
Emancipation is the key difference between critical theory and what Horkheimer
called traditional theory. The traditional theorist stands removed in theorizing about
his or her object:
If, however, the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a
dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal
contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation
but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges.46
It is not surprising that this activist bent appeals to thinkers in the design
disciplines, because a criticalist approach gives theoretical heft to design processes
that by definition envision what can be, as opposed to what already is. For
instance, here is Michael Hays, a leading voice for a critical architecture (italics
his): “Critical architecture pushes aside other kinds of discourse or communication
in order to place before the world a culturally informed product, part of whose
self-definition includes the implication of discontinuity and difference from other

cultural activities.”47 The discontinuity and difference “from other cultural
activities” is the vestigial remains of the original criticalist instinct to emancipate
human experience in some way. But by the time architectural theorists frame critical
theory, it is often not clear what the emancipation is to be from. Hays, for instance,
cites Mies van der Rohe’s Alexanderplatz project of 1928 as an example of critical
architecture. The basis for this seems to be Mies stating that he eschews formalism
as such. On the strength of this, Hays notes that Mies rejected the Alexanderplatz
competition specifications and created a project that “open(ed) up a clearing of
impacable silence in the chaos of the nervous metropolis; this clearing is a radical
critique.”48 Why this is critical in an emancipatory sense is not clear. It seems resistance
to established standards took precedence over explicit emancipation. And if
resistance is the criterium rather than emancipation, then Hays is on more solid
footing. His essay calls for resistance against historicist design, against pure formalism,
against correspondence between architecture and other regulating constructs. But the
question still remains as to why resistance to any established order is, axiomatically,
a helpful thing. I will return to this matter vis-à-vis the Chinese case shortly.
Suffice it to say that there is also discontent with critical theory—to use George
Baird’s word in his 2004 essay “ ‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” which I have
adopted as this section’s title. Chief among these voices is Robert Somol and
Sarah Whiting in their “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of
Modernism.” Here the authors suggest a more accommodational approach to
theorizing the design of buildings. Hence the Doppler effect, in the sense that a
design can be either “cool” (receding) or “hot” (proximate) in coloration to X issue:
a Doppler architecture acknowledges the adaptive synthesis of architec-

ture’s many contingencies. Rather than isolating a singular autonomy, the
Doppler focuses upon the effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent
multiplicities: material, program, writing, atmosphere, form, technologies,
economics, etc.49
The last word, “economics,” is key. Namely, Somol and Whiting seem to
acknowledge that, among the contingencies it needs to address, architecture cannot
but engage with forces that, in one way or another, drive markets. This is the
conundrum of critical theory in architectural commentary. While critique of
capitalism goes right to the core of Marxist ideology, it is difficult to resist
economic factors (read: the production of wealth) as an enabling basis for
architectural production. Certainly in his essay, Baird is more explicit than Somol
and Whiting in being accommodational. Baird reminds his readers that, far from
resistance (or even emancipation), the leading criticalist figure among architectural
theorists, Manfredo Tafuri, prized the works of “Eliel Saarinen, Clarence Stein,
and Henry Wright—not to mention the New Deal creators of the Tennesse Valley
Authority.”50 Baird’s point is clear: architectural theory needs to do more than just
resist, or oppose; it needs to address architecture, as Somol and Whiting put it,
134 Present
projectively rather than merely critically. “Rather than looking back or criticizing
the status quo, the Doppler projects forward alternative (not necessarily opposi-
tional) arrangements or scenarios.”51 Architecture must have an instrumental
dimension. Even Adorno, who inveighed against the “instrumental rationality of
mass production,” recognized a problematic with architecture: “If out of disgust
with functional forms and their inherent conformism it wanted to give free reign
to fantasy, it would fall immediately into kitsch.”52 Architecture’s very physical
presence in the sociocultural community necessitates its multivarious engagements
with practical human life. In writing on Adorno’s aesthetics vis-à-vis architecture,
Hilde Heynen puts it this way:
The very process of modernization is carried out, in part, by and in

architecture: economic growth leads to material realizations in the form of
buildings and transformations of environments. In this way, architecture is
in line with a process of modernization that is determined by economic
growth and concentration of power; architecture cannot get round this social
determination.53
All of this is to say that, moving forward, theorizing Chinese architecture requires
more than criticalist postures of resistance. Of course, given the current Chinese
government’s roots in Marxism, critical theory (or Critical Theory) can seem to
be a sensible basis for theorizing design. But this needs to be balanced with the
reality of life in China today, which is driven by “capitalism with Chinese
characteristics.” Make no mistake: this moniker captures the core of the Chin-
ese market economy today. As such, it wields tremendous, albeit implicit,
power. Solving what this moniker means in architectural terms, in light of a
government still clinging to Marxist ideology, can indeed be a fruitful pursuit.
Jianfei Zhu, it seems, offers two answers. First, he suggests that the criticalist
approach is now not only coming from the West to China, but also going from
China to the West.54 But given the ambiguity of “criticality” in the architectural
domain just addressed, I am not convinced that this parity of exchange between
China and the West, if it actually exists, holds much promise for theorizing
architecture in China moving forward. But more importantly, second, Zhu
promotes a “different” kind of criticality for Chinese architecture in light of China’s
own philosophical roots, ones that, as I have tried to show in these chapters, have
different moorings than what motivated ideas in the West. Zhu describes an
architectural praxis based on this different approach:
a reform of the idea of the critical by bringing in a “relational” perspective,

so that the agenda is no longer critique as confrontation or negation of the
opposed other, but critique as participation with and possible reform of the
related other, including agents of power, capital and natural resource, in an
ethical and organic universe.55
Well, this ethical and organic universe sounds like a return, at least of some
sort, to the correlative foundations shown in Figure 1.3a. Can Chinese architecture
moving forward draw from this source? In the next two chapters I suggest that
pursuing the answer to this question is one way towards the “different” kind of
criticality Zhu alludes to.
Notes
1 Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman” (1918). Available at Marxists Internet Archive,
www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1918/04/x01.htm. Accessed June 20, 2015.
2 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1977).
3 “The last serious revolutionary in philosophy I take to have been Kant . . . He concluded
that we were subjects in a closed world of appearances, and nobody has yet found a way
out . . . structuralism, I think, helps to make it more intelligible.” Peter Caws,
Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (New Jersey and London: Humanities Press
International, 1991), 4.
4 Jianfei Zhu, Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique (London and New York:
Routledge, 2009).
5 Guanghui Ding, “ ‘Experimental Architecture’ in China,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 73:1, 28–37.
6 Liang Sicheng, “Why Study Chinese Architecture?,” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 73:1 (March, 2014), 8–11. First published in Bulletin of the Society for Research
in Chinese Architecture 7:1.
7 John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980). Aside from the title, note how he makes the point that the Classical Orders, as a
vocabulary, can be spoken by different designers and the results would be different, just
as the same language structure enables endless varieties of original expressions.
MA: MIT Press, 1985). The classic drawing of the Chinese “Order” is on page 10.
9 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Penguin, 1994).
10 John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in The Early Works (Carbondale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 231.
11 Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), 249.
12 Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge University Press,
1996).
13 See this point in “Sebastiano Serlio: Italian Architect,” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.
britannica.com/biography/Sebastiano-Serlio. Accessed July 7, 2015.
14 I am referring to the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
edited by Denis Diderot in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the Cyclopædia:
or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in England in 1728.
15 J.N.L. Durand, “Introduction,” in Precis of the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles, CA:
Getty Research Institute Publications Program, 2000).
16 Jeffrey Cody, “Striking a Harmonious Chord: Foreign Missionaries and Chinese-style
Buildings, 1911–1949,” Architronic, 1996, http://corbu2.caed.kent.edu/architronic/PDF/
v5n3/v5n3_03.pdf. Accessed May 31, 2015.
17 Peter Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 73.
18 Rudolf G. Wagner, “Ritual, Architecture, Politics, and Publicity During the Republic:
Enshrining Sun Yat-sen,” in Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin,
eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press,
Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 246.
136 Present
19 K. Sizheng Fan, “Culture for Sale: Western Classical Architecture in China’s Recent
Building Boom,” Journal of Architectural Education 63:1 (2009), 64–74.
20 See for example Wang Mingxian, “Notes on Architecture and Postmodernism in
China,” trans. Zhang Xudong in Boundary 2 24:3 (1997), 163–175.
21 Daniel Libeskind, “Symbol and Interpretation,” in Harry Mallgrave and Christina
Contandriopoulos, Architectural Theory Volume II (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2008), 464–466.
22 Michael Speaks, “Intelligence After Theory,” in Perspecta 38: Architecture After All 2006,
104.
23 Jean François-Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota, 1984), xxiii-xxv.
24 Charles Jencks, The Story of Postmodernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical (New
York: John Wiley, 2011), 79.
25 Ibid., 84.
26 Jeffrey Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935
(Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, and Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2001), 34–37.
27 See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990),
336.
28 Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong (London: Penguin, 2006), 40–42.
29 Ibid., 48.
30 K. Sizheng Fan, “A Classicist Architecture for Utopia,” in Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S.
Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (Honolulu, HI:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 103.
31 Wagner, “Ritual, Architecture, Politics, and Publicity During the Republic,” in Jeffrey
W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, op. cit., 238.
32 Ibid., 239.
33 Ibid., 238–239.
34 Wilma Fairbank, “Liang Ssu-ch’eng: A Profile” in Liang Ssu-ch’eng, A Pictorial History
of Chinese Architecture, ed. Wilma Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), xiii–xix.
35 Xiao Hu, Reorienting the Profession: Chinese Architectural Transformation Between 1949–1959,
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2009.
36 Ibid., 124–126.
37 This is quoted from ibid., 210. Hu cites his source as Liang Sicheng, “The Soviet Advisors
Help Us to Correct Our Understanding of Architecture,” in The Works of Liang Sicheng,
vol. 5 (Beijing: Architectural Science Press, 2001), 150–153.
38 Tania Branigan, “China’s Cultural Revolution: Portraits of Accuser and Accused,” in
The Guardian, February 24, 2012, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/24/
cultural-revolution-portraits-xu-weixin. Accessed July 26, 2015.
39 Xiao Hu, op. cit., 212–232.
40 Ian Johnson, “As Beijing Becomes a Supercity, the Rapid Growth Brings Pains,” in
New York Times, July 19, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/world/asia/in-china-
a-supercity-rises-around-beijing.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-
ipad&_r=0#. Accessed July 26, 2015.
41 This heading is of course the title of George Baird’s “ ‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,”
Harvard Design Magazine (Fall/Winter 2004), www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/
21/criticality-and-its-discontents. Accessed May 20, 2015.
42 See David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (London:
Hutchinson, 1980), 16–19.
43 David Held, op. cit.
44 For instance see Stephen Eric Bonner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011). “Kant . . . provided critical theory with its
definition of scientific rationality, and its goal of confronting reality with the prospects
of freedom.” 14. Critical theory also rejects aspects of Kant, even though he is seen as
a kind of starting point. See Held, ibid., 157–160.
45 James Bohman, “Critical Theory,” in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/,

March 8, 2005. Accessed May 17, 2015.
46 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, 215. This article was written in
1937 and is available online: www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/hork.doc. Accessed May 20, 2015.
47 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984),
22.
48 Ibid., 22. The citation from Mies is noted as being from Philip Johnson’s “Mies van der
Rohe,” New York, Museum of Modern Art 1947. No pagination is given.
49 Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods
of Modernism,” Perspecta 33: Mining Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 75.
50 Baird, op. cit.
51 Somol and Whiting, op. cit., 75.
52 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury,
1997), 44.
53 Hilde Heynen, “Architecture Between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Assemblage 17 (April, 1992), 78–91 (86).
54 Jianfei Zhu, “Criticality in between China and the West, 1996–2004,” in op. cit.,
129–167.
55 Jianfei Zhu, “A Global Site and a Different Criticality,” in op. cit., 198.
PART III
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6
A PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE
ARCHITECTURE
Kenneth Frampton’s “Towards a Critical Regionalism” propounds an architecture

of resistance against unreflective assumptions that the products of Western culture
are to be embraced de facto, expressed in a universal sameness of built environments.
Frampton cites Paul Ricoeur: “Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the
same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities.”1
The criticalist aspect of Frampton’s critical regionalism is taking a stand against market
forces that result in this anonymous sameness in built environments. This resistance
is accomplished by returning to local cues to inform design tectonics appropriate
for a given locality. Frampton identifies six cues: build the site, topography, con-
text, climate, light, and tectonic form. Readers can refer to his essay for elaboration
on these foci; I will address them as needed as I outline a philosophy of Chinese
architecture.
The challenge to Frampton’s theory is that, in sum, it only outlines a general
theoretical position for a designer to take (e.g “I want to apply critical regionalist
principles to X design”). But this can prove insufficient because Frampton’s cues
only set the stage for what to look for. For example, a building’s siting “has many
levels of significance, for it has a capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory
of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation
across time.”2 But what kind of subsequent cultivation and transformation across
time? What constitutes the “capacity to embody” in X case? These questions can
only be answered by accessing long-standing philosophical outlooks that have
animated the specifics of cultivation and transformation for a given region.
By a philosophy of Chinese architecture, then, I mean to ask how architecture
in China currently expresses one of the longest philosophical traditions in human
history. And how is the current situation not such a reflection? Answers to these
questions should provide bases for a Chinese comprehension of Frampton’s six
categories. Answers to these questions are one way of developing theoretical
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approaches for Chinese architecture that fit its own ideological genetic memory.
A recurring theme in the last two chapters is that architecture in China since 1840
has had imposed upon it many projections of ideas from external (European) sources.
To again paraphrase Wu Hung, contemporary Chinese buildings tend to be skin
deep;3 there is little ontological depth animating their presence. In this chapter
I look to China’s own philosophical lines in search of how such depth can be
recovered for her architecture moving forward.
Returning to earlier philosophical sources does not mean that architecture in
China should return to how it “looked” before 1840. My aim is to foreground Chinese
philosophical threads already embedded in the modernist admixture diagrammed
in Figure 4.3, ones that have been relegated to the background in China’s plunge
into modernity. What I propose does not reject a criticalist stance; to the contrary,
it outlines what “a different criticality,” as Jianfei Zhu has called for, might entail.
The Calligraphic Lilt (1)

I begin with calligraphy because even now it is an active connection between
contemporary Chinese culture and the earliest philosophical constructs mentioned
in Chapter 1, e.g. the Five Goings (wu3 xin2), the yin1 yang2, in short, the vitalist
element in the correlative outlook. In such an organicist system, qi4 comprises all
things. Calligraphy is one way qi is directed into empirical expressions. And because
the objects of Chinese calligraphy are the pictographs of the Chinese language, what
results is a way of making sense of the cosmos that is inherently aesthetic. In other
words, comprehending reality connotatively more than denotatively is essential, as
opposed to additional, in this way of building, dwelling, thinking—and writing. Thus
Yuehping Yen notes how Chinese environments are typically filled with calligraphy,
rendering them “abode(s) of calligraphic inscriptions”:
Not only natural landscape is scattered with calligraphic inscriptions: so is

artificial landscape. In temples and most traditional buildings, one expects to
find a horizontal inscribed board on the lintel over the gate, couplets on
columns and poems on walls, all written in brush, by people of different
times.4
Ronald Knapp’s term for this is “representative density,” that is, the
omnipresence of writing on “entryways and windows, on interior lattice door and
window panels, as well as in and about altar rooms, kitchens, [and] bedsteads.”
Indeed, Knapp documents entire villages in southern China laid out in the plan
of a calligraphy set: the land as the paper, a pond for the inkstand, large stones
standing in for ink sticks, a path as the writing brush, and distant mountains as the
brush holder (thereby converting inauspicious mountains looking like fire into an
auspicious use).5
This calligraphizing of all experience, on Yen’s view, makes philosophical
aesthetics a different problematic in the Chinese case. She cites Kant’s rejection of
A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture 143
utilitarian objects as art. (On Kant’s view, aesthetic enjoyment is disinterested; in

this way Kant separated aesthetic enjoyment from propositional, that is, denotative,
knowledge.) But if the very word-signs of language are themselves pictographs,
and if they are further aestheticized via calligraphy, the entire cultural milieu becomes
essentially an aesthetic, as opposed to a reductively propositional, reality.
Now, Liu Xiaohu, professor of architecture at Huazhong University of
Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, says that a Chinese architectural theory
must recover an understanding of architecture as part of an “organic whole” that
includes Chinese medicine, garden cultivation, tea, food, feng1 shui3, li3 (ritual)
and xiao4 (filial piety).6 The Qing dynasty scholar Chen Fuyao’s diary of life in
his garden gives a sense of this kind of holistic life-in-environment; and it certainly
includes calligraphy. Joseph Cho Wang cites Chen’s diary in his The Chinese Garden;
this is from an entry under “Summer”:
During the late morning, I casually read parts of Laozi and Zhuangzi, or
practised brush strokes patterned after famous calligraphers of the past. At noon,
I took off my head scarf, hung it up over a cliff, and then sat around a bamboo
couch with close friends to discuss the scholarly work of Qi xie and Shanhai
Jing. When tired, I took a nap and enjoyed a good dream. Thereafter, we
had coconut and other fruit as a snack and lotus-flower wine as a beverage.7
In this totalized world, traditional Chinese architecture exemplifies a transference

of the organicism of calligraphy to the aesthetic quality of buildings. The curvilinear
lilt of the roof is perhaps where this similarity is most noticeable; but the entire
body of a traditional structure reads comfortably because it reads calligraphically.
Figure 6.1b shows a ting2 ze, or gazebo; next to it is the pictograph hui4, meaning
a gathering or assembly. The “roofline” of hui obviously resembles the roofline of
the tingze. Pictographing empirical realities by word-signs is a well-established source
for the Chinese script. For example, Wang notes that the graph for garden (yuan2)
brings together graphs for a building, pool, plant or rock, all surrounded by an
enclosure.8 Now place Chen Fuyao in his garden practicing brushwork “patterned
after famous calligraphers from the past” and we have an affirmation of Yen’s point
that Chinese environments amount to “abode(s) of calligraphic inscriptions.”
In the transition from correlativism to modernism, this calligraphic lilt was lost
in architecture in China. When Chinese architecture lost its apperceptive quality
(Chapter 4), buildings lost a living connection between their ontology and a larger
being-ness of the Chinese people, one that breathed a calligraphic spirit into built
environments. As Chinese architecture moves forward, recapturing the calligraphic
lilt should play a role. Obviously by this I don’t just mean curvy forms akin to the
traditional upturned eave. There are plenty of curvy forms in China’s new
architecture; for instance, the Dulles Airport-like columns and roofline of the
Hangzhou East train station, the Mercedes-Benz exhibition hall in Shanghai, or
the National Opera in Beijing, an enormous pearl-like form that seems to have
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FIGURE 6.1a Hui4, meaning assembly or gathering.
FIGURE 6.1b A pavilion in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou.

alighted just next to the Great Hall of the People. These all exist as single objects
in space with a theoretical rationale largely indistinguishable from Cartesian
propositionalism. Curvy forms by themselves do not guarantee calligraphic lilt. I
have in mind something much more and, because more, there is not a template
for what it can look like.
Wang Shu, the 2012 Pritzker Prize winner, deserves mention in this regard,
not least because his mode of design might embody what the calligraphic lilt can
entail in contemporary architecture practice. Wang Shu cultivates calligraphy not
for formal imitation, but rather for rooting the process of architectural creation
into the soil of larger aesthetic impulses:
For me, practicing Chinese calligraphy year-round also has a special

significance for my designs and sketches. Compared with the contemporary
fast pace of Chinese society, calligraphy always helps lead me into a tranquil
inner world, a focused but very natural and relaxed state of mind. The writing
of every character is like constructing a living place or part of a garden.9
One senses here a historic Chinese way of being not unlike that of Chen Fuyao’s:
gardens, calligraphy, architecture, how one spends one’s day. The danger in this
model is of course elitism, or an elevation of the life of the aesthete, not possible
for the overwhelming numbers of Chinese citizens. But this exclusivism is checked
by the kind of architecture birthed, as I explain below.
I suggest four traits of the calligraphic lilt, which can take form in a diversity
of “looks.” The first is fluency over materiality. Calligraphic statements are fluent in
their totality; each part is subservient to the whole. But often in contemporary
Chinese construction, the materiality is uncomfortable, whether in execution
(Figures 6.3a and b), scale, jointure, or adjacency. The tectonics is often wanting.
There is no embedded cultural memory in Chinese practice to guide the assemblage
of modern materials. Modern materials are as much an imposition on the Chinese
correlative view as are modern ideas. Steel, plastics, and mass production of
identical building components had no place in an organicist worldview. Fluency
over materiality, then, brings a sense that modern materiality is brought into the
life-flow of the creative gesture. One begins to sense this in Wang Shu’s new campus
guest house at the Hangzhou Academy of Art, which brings together concrete,
bamboo, wood, stone, and ornamental metal into a single gesture (Figure 6.2a).
His use of reclaimed tiles in his walls at the Ningbo Museum (and also at the
Academy of Art) also has an ethos of fluency over materiality (Figure 6.2b).
Second, the calligraphic lilt emphasizes porosity between architecture and nature.
Calligraphy is spatial. The pictograph itself is a figure-ground pattern of solids and
voids, of which the voids are as essential to the gesture as are the solids. Calligraphic
abodes, therefore, are interplays between solids and voids; the spatial aspect taken
up by the ever-changing offerings of life in nature, whether this is in the sense of
the lived life of the people, or in the more primary sense of natural life forms
themselves; gardens for instance (see Figure 1.5b).
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FIGURE 6.2a Guest house at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, by Wang Shu.
FIGURE 6.2b Reclaimed tile wall at Ningbo Museum in Ningbo, by Wang Shu.
The third, and perhaps the most difficult to capture, trait of the calligraphic lilt
is literary holism. My survey of (what I think are) successful recent architectural
productions in China suggests that they tend to evoke a literary spirit, in the sense
that there is a compositional feel to them. I am thinking of the key Chinese notion
of wen2, which makes an indelible link between culture and writing, and all of it
an exercise in weaving. Chapter 3 noted Sinologist Haun Saussy’s definition of wen,
but it is worthwhile citing it again:
Wen is (to cite several dictionaries at once) markings; patterns; stripes,

streaks, lines, veins; whorls; bands; writing, graph, expression, composition;
ceremony, culture, refinement, education, ornament, elegance, civility; civil
as opposed to military; literature.10
All of this is subsumed under the two primary meanings of wen, as culture and
literature. Obviously this allows for a wide array of empirical arrangements; the
key is whether the literary sense is present or not. Because Wang Shu’s works at
the China Academy of Art are part of a campus plan, the compositional aspect
holds clues for larger scale applications. Today, one striking tension in China’s
burgeoning cities is the push–pull between historic patterns of weaving, on the one
hand, confronted by modernist buildings as single objects, on the other. Major
structures are locatable with Cartesian precision, while local addresses are lost in a
woven pattern of hutongs and precincts. For instance, when I asked a cab driver
to take me to the address of none other than FCZJ, Yung Ho Chang’s office, he
responded, “I can take you to the neighborhood, but not this address; there are
4,000 hutongs in Beijing and I can’t keep track of them all.” I am not saying
increased calligraphic presence in Chinese urban planning will make single addresses
easier to find. My point is that literary-compositional sensibilities might soften the
harsh divide between buildings as objects and woven neighborhood patterns.
The fourth trait of the calligraphic lilt is organic jointure between materials, to wit:
Extending li3-ritual to Tectonics, by Means of li3-Principle

Figure 6.3a shows a construction detail in a newly constructed public building in
Xi’an. The tiles at the windowsill are uneven as installed; and grout is not only
in the joints (unevenly applied) but smeared on the window trim as well.
Figure 6.3b shows an all-too-common feature of uneven risers in stairways in China.
These details exemplify a broad swathe of construction quality in China today.
When asked about the unevenness of the tilework in Figure 6.3a, I was told that
construction volume is so heavy these days there are not enough trained
tradespeople to go around; unskilled rural workers must be taught on site.
But unskilled labor is not the only reason for shoddy details. The correlative
view did not have time to accommodate modern materials and techniques into its
system. Certainly there was a mastery of wood. Chapter 2 outlined how Song
dynasty builders were guided by a systematic construction methodology for imperial
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FIGURE 6.3a Detail of a windowsill in a new building, Xi’an.
FIGURE 6.3b Risers of uneven heights in a building in Wuhan.

structures in wood; specifically, cai2 and fen4 were units of both social and
architectural order. The result was a profound linkage between societal practices
and architectural expressions. Here I ask whether extending other philosophical
terms into the realm of architecture can kindle a theory of moral excellence in
contemporary Chinese tectonics. Consider:
The bricks of these steps have in them the principle of bricks . . . A bamboo
chair has in it the principle of the bamboo chair. It is correct to say that dry
and withered things have no spirit of life, but it is incorrect to say that they
have no principle of life.11
This is from the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200 CE), whose

school elevated li3-principle to the leading technical term for Song dynasty
Confucian orthodoxy. Li is something like the One of Parmenides in early Greek
thought, but neo-Confucians had no problem with seeing li as also distributed in
all things: li in brick steps, li in bamboo chairs, and so on. Unlike the Platonic
forms, in which each empirical construct (e.g. steps, chairs, etc.) had its own
corresponding ideal form, the pluralities of li in things are also li-as-One. Now,
the moral-ethical dimension of the li-principle system is evident in such statements
as this, from one of Zhu Xi’s predecessors, Cheng Hao (1032–1085 CE):
There is only one principle in the world. You may extend it over the four
seas and it is everywhere true . . . Therefore to be serious is merely to be
serious with this principle. To be humane is to be humane with this principle.
To be faithful is to be faithful with this principle.12
Statements such as this include key moral terms such as benevolence (ren2), here
rendered “humane”; in Cheng Hao, Confucian benevolence is woven together
with li-principle. Again, li is in brick steps, li is in chairs. Chinese philosophy’s
moral-ethical emphasis often used material objects as illustrative examples (e.g. brick
steps, chairs); indeed, the Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yanming held that the
scope of humanity included “tiles and stones.”13 By the early Qing dynasty, the
materialist thinker Wang Fuzhi actually held that “What is meant by the Way is
the management of concrete things; when the Way is fulfilled, we call it virtue”
(italics added). Or again:
All functions in the world are those of existing things. From their functions
I know they possess substance . . . Both substance and function exist, and
each depends on the other to be concrete. Therefore it is said, “Sincerity is
the beginning and end of things. Without sincerity there will be nothing.”14
Managing materiality goes hand in hand with sincerity. But Wang’s case and
the earlier examples all demonstrate that, while Chinese philosophy used physical
objects to illustrate moral truths within or between persons, rarely did it address
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the fabrication or jointure of the objects themselves as tectonic embodiments of

morality. In contrast, consider John Ruskin’s rubric for architectural virtue: a
building must act well, speak well, look well, “and please us by its presence.”15
For Ruskin, the moral state of the maker should be transferred to the moral
condition of the object made. As I noted in the Introduction, Aristotle himself
used material productions as evidence of the producer’s virtue.16 But in the Confucian
case, the morally perfected person’s aim was precisely not “in pursuing the sort of
specialized craft or skill that would result in material achievement.”17
This traditional outlook is not sufficient to meet the needs of a culture that is
now building more buildings than anywhere else in the world. From a philosophical
point of view, Figure 6.3 is evidence of a culture that embraced Cartesian positivism
but did not grasp its demand for orderliness in the details, on the one hand. On
the other hand, it is a culture that rejected Confucianism, but did not grasp its
potential for guiding the excellent jointure of materials as itself an extension of
moral cultivation. The way forward is to consider how this extension can be derived
in formulating “a different criticality” for architectural theory in China.
We begin by returning to sources. Chinese construction relates differently to
its philosophical base than we see, for example, in Vitruvius. Chapter 1 noted that
traditional construction in China greatly emphasized change. Thus Klaas
Ruitenbeek writes of elaborate rituals for “shifting the center” in building a new
residence (see Chapter 1).18 Much attention was given to congruence with
unmeasurable vitalistic factors. In contrast, in his sections having to do with wall
construction, Vitruvius begins with the materials themselves—sand, brick, stone—
and derives his tectonic rationale from Democritus’s theory of atoms.19 The atomic
substrate guides the human mind to devise methods for construction that aim at
regularity and predictability. Excellence of craftsmanship, then, resonates with how
the fundamental components of nature are dependably joined. But the organicist
character of Chinese philosophy was less primed to reify regularity in construction
detailing; emphases on change did not provide a theoretical framework for
repeatable construction quality.
It is at this point that the earlier li3 in Confucianism (meaning ritual, propriety,
etiquette) can inform the later Song dynasty li-principle in deriving a critical theory
for tectonic excellence. For this, I look to the black sheep of early Confucian
thinkers, Xunzi. Xunzi was the last great Confucian thinker of the Warring States
Period (479–221 BCE). His dates are uncertain, but we know he lived after
Mencius (b. 372 BCE) and prior to the unification of the warring factions into one
empire by the Qin in 221 BCE. Xunzi may not have lived to see this unification,
but two of his students, most notably the Legalist Han Fei, were important
theorists for the repressive Qin state. This fact alone underlines why Xunzi has
enjoyed less recognition in comparison to his predecessor Mencius. Legalism’s
draconian treatment of subjects with no recognition of innate moral good in them
resonated with Xunzi’s formulation that human nature is e4 (evil, bad), 20 counter
to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. But Xunzi’s formulation may be rooted
in the disillusion that comes when ideology doesn’t jibe with empirical evidence—
recall how the original critical theorists had to rethink Marxist idealism in the wake
of Hitler and Stalin’s atrocities after the initial euphoria of the Bolshevik Revolution
(see Chapter 5). Xunzi follows Mencius by over a century, and by Xunzi’s day
raging wars between the divided states had dragged on for two centuries. If human
nature is innately good, why all this strife and suffering? And so in light of
empirical evidence—and we might say in good criticalist fashion—Xunzi explicitly
parted ways with Mencius on the latter’s doctrine that human nature is good.21
But Xunzi was also a devoted Confucian thinker, so how to rethink the
Confucian project? By a new interpretation of li-ritual:
the ink-line is the ultimate in straightness, the scale is the ultimate in balance,
the compass and carpenter’s square are the ultimate in circular and rectangular,
and ritual is the ultimate in the human way. Those who nevertheless do not
take ritual as their model nor find sufficiency in it are called standardless
commoners.22
For Confucius and Mencius, li-ritual emits out of human goodness as expressions
of ren-benevolence. But for Xunzi, li-ritual acts as a kind of scaffolding to keep in
check a human nature that is essentially bad. In this regard, for architecture, it is
unfortunate that Xunzi’s more evidence-based theory of human frailty was rejected
by the idealistic Confucian tradition through the centuries. This suppressed any
views on artifice, which may have been very useful for developing Chinese-based
theories of architectural tectonics as European technology inundated China in the
nineteenth century. This is because out of Xunzi’s explanation for how li-ritual
curbs the excesses of human nature emerges an empirical world of ordered things.
In other words, culture emerges through li-ritual:
Thus, ritual is a means of nurture. Meats and grains, the five flavors and the
various spices are means to nurture the mouth. Fragrances and perfumes are
means to nurture the nose. Carving and inlay, insignias and patterns are means
to nurture the eyes. Bells and drums, pipes and chimes, lutes and zithers are
means to nurture the ears. Homes and palaces, cushions and beds, tables and
mats are means to nurture the body. Thus, ritual is a means of nurture.23
A.C. Graham says this in commenting on Xunzi: “Artifice, as culture, morality,

ceremony, disguises the ch’ing (qing2) of man, what he is in himself.”24 Thus
ceremony (read: ritual) guides human inclinations, directing them towards creation
of civil society. Xunzi:
Overall, ritual works to ornament happiness when serving the living, to

ornament sorrow when sending off the dead, to ornament respect when
conducting sacrifices, and to ornament awe-inspiring power when engaged
in military affairs . . . Thus, the appearance of the tomb resembles a home
and dwelling. The inner and outer coffins resemble the front, back, sides,
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and covering of a chariot. The coverings and decorations for the coffins and
funeral cart resemble curtains and canopy. The bracing for the burial pit
resembles walls, roofing, fencing, and door and window coverings.25
Much more than Confucius or Mencius, Xunzi’s philosophy necessarily encom-

passes the furnishings of a social world, now engaged as tools in the cultivation of
moral character. I say necessarily because li-ritual for Xunzi must be more pre-
scriptive so the specifics of curbing human nature can be empirically demonstrated.
In Confucius, li is often couched in general terms: “Among the functions of li the
most valuable is that it establishes harmony; the excellence of the ways of the ancient
kings consists of this.”26 No mention of walls or window coverings here.
Confucius’s day was more idealistic; Xunzi’s day called for more details.
In “The Rule of a True King,” li-ritual is not merely defined as a set of practices;
it permeates a peaceful kingdom because “the character of a true king is that he
ornaments his every move with ritual and yi4 (righteousness).”27 This is in the
section of the Xunzi that itemizes responsibilities for each of the king’s ministers:
the Master of Cups, the Director of Cavalry, the Director of Public works, the
Village Master, all the way to the Heavenly King himself. Of particular interest is
the work of the Master Craftsman. This individual is to “honor perfection and
usefulness, and to prepare equipment and materials so that people do not dare to
make up ways of carving, polishing, and patterning themselves at home.”28 Social
prosperity by li-ritual, then, is not laissez-faire, but is minutely regulated to keep
human nature on the rails. And the measure of success for all of this? Architecture:
And so if they use yi in order to make social divisions, then they will be
harmonized. If they are harmonized, then they will be unified. If they are
unified, then they will have more force. If they have more force, then they
will be strong . . . And so they can get to live in homes and palaces . . . This
is the meaning of saying that “one must not let go of ritual and yi for even
a moment.”29
It is therefore not a stretch to see the Xunzi as a rich source for deriving theories
for “houses and palaces,” which is to say, for architecture; which is to say, for
tectonic excellence. Xunzi’s historically unpopular idea that human nature is e4
actually provides a basis for comprehending architecture as a means for cultivating
community wellness and excellence in design protocol. In short, architecture—
the processes of its realization as well as the practices of its use—can be subsumed
under the embrace of li-ritual. A benefit of this approach is that moral excellence
is embedded in the theoretical logic. In other words, excellent assemblage of
architectural parts can be integrated with the cultivation of the moral life of persons
into a single material-moral theory of communitarian tectonics. In Chapter 2,
I cited this from Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk: “By providing a full range of housing
types and workplaces . . . the bonds of an authentic community are formed.”30
The problem with this idea is that there is no substantive logic tying physical forms
(housing types) to human behavior (authentic community). Here there is one. Moral
cultivation in discharging life’s responsibilities—understood as li-ritual expressed
in architectural practice—not only entails protocols of human relations, but also
extends to the management of material things. The latter is an outflow of the former.
How to put this into practice?
Vernacularity, and the Architect as Cultivator

I coin “vernacularity” to distinguish what I have in mind from “vernacular” as
such. Bernard Rudolfsky’s Architecture Without Architects classically established the
view that local constructions without the aid of professional architects tend to be
authentic expressions, reflecting the wisdom of accrued practice appropriate for a
locale. Frampton’s critical regionalist sympathies are certainly an outgrowth from
this outlook. Vernacularity does not reject the vernacular defined in this way. But
it adds an accommodation in the Chinese case, which is that of an ingrained
philosophical predisposition to downplay the details of the constructional dimension of life;
to see it as secondary to a more primary metaphysics of existence, namely,
conforming to the spontaneous—and thus moral—workings of the cosmos. “The
accomplished scholar,” says Confucius, “is not a utensil.”31 This is to say that the
morally virtuous person is not one dimensional; he or she is not utilitarian, as would
be, say, a cooking pot or a scythe. Or a building. Being one with the universe,
the morally virtuous person can do what she or he wishes “without transgressing
moral principles.”32 The emphasis is upon spontaneous moral excellence emitting
from the cultivated individual; cultivating excellence in physical environments is
beside the point. Daoism shares the same resistance against material specifications:
“Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room/Adapt the nothing therein
to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the room.”33 Buddhist
sympathies largely follow suit:
Good and learned friends . . . only if we can be free from characters will the
substance of our nature be pure. That is the meaning of taking the absence-
of-character as the substance. Absence-of-thought means not to be defiled
by external objects.34
In all these threads formative of the Chinese cultural gestalt, making is subservient
to being. At least making is not, as we have seen, an essential exemplification of
moral achievement. One outcome of this bent is a certain “putting up with” tiles
that aren’t even, showers stalls that overflow, and stair risers of different heights.
There is an implicit sense that these realities are, well, they are what they are; but
they are not of primary consequence. This aspect results in the vernacularity of
Chinese built environments. Now, in one sense there is an authentic spirit of the
vernacular in this vernacularity. The question is in what ways this kind of
authenticity should be brought to the fore as an aspect of the state of affairs
diagrammed in Figure 4.3.
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It is here that the practice of architecture can make an impact. As we saw in

Chapter 4, “architect” itself was an unknown classification in China as late as the
nineteenth century. As this role evolves in China, an opportunity arises for
architects to embody a link between the past and the future. In traditional Chinese
culture the learned individual comprised the shi4 class. This was someone trained
in the Confucian classics, who had passed the civil service examinations, and who
was active in government service as a scholar-administrator. It was a rarified position.
No doubt the shi were also the people who eschewed the “utensil” nature of physical
construction. They were literary individuals, not workmen. They were literary
educators in the broad sense, setting the example for how a value-full life is lived
in service to society and culture. But in traditional times literary excellence
somehow qualified one to manage, for instance, the building of infrastructure (albeit,
perhaps, infrastructure exemplary of vernacularity). In the present day, a new
architect-as-shi role can elevate excellence in tectonic detailing as itself an exercise
in literary jointure. This would operationalize the extension of li-ritual and li-principle
to material tectonics, because it would be embedded in what practice as an
architect would entail. Chapter 5 cited Xiao Hu’s doctoral dissertation; from it we
can see that the emergence and growth of the architectural profession in China
was largely patterned along Western templates: licensure, professional societies,
journals, establishment of architecture schools, and so on. I suggest that all of these
traits can be regarded as the yung4 (functional aspect) of architecture as a profession
in China; but the ti3 (essential aspect) still needs definition. (See Chapter 4 for the
ti–yung distinction.) As the profession moves forward, it is time to reincorporate
Chinese roots in the cultivation of architects in China. And I suggest a key to this
cultivation is a resurgence of the literary instinct as emblematic of learning,
knowledge, community leadership, and moral excellence, all expressed as a
recognition of li-principle in materials, brought together excellently by li-ritual in
practice. This would be the ti-essential aspect. There are several emerging examples.
Li Baofeng’s Dinosaur Egg Museum is located some 200 kilometers north of
Wuhan, in Hubei Province. The museum replaces an earlier structure housing
prehistoric dinosaur eggs discovered on site. Li is a former dean of the School of
Architecture at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology; in this capacity
his commissions come through HUST’s Design Institute. Li’s museum is built from
recycled tiles and local concrete erected by local workmen:
This is an area in which the skill of the local workers is quite low . . .
thought I would use two local materials: bamboo, and concrete because,
like many towns, Yun Xian had a concrete producing facility. I used the
bamboo as forms so that the texture of the concrete would be rough. You
can’t really use aluminum cladding, or anything requiring fine joints, because
it is not uncommon for this level of labor to miss by several centimeters at
elements that are supposed to join. So the rough concrete was a good solution
for this fact. I worked with the workers in building some samples with
concrete pours before we started on the construction itself.35
FIGURE 6.4a Dinosaur Egg Museum, Hubei Province, by Li Baofeng.
FIGURE 6.4b Dinosaur Egg Museum wall detail.

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In my interview with him, Li had Frampton explicitly in mind in terms of

“building the site”:
My students and I always talk over site issues for any project, and we make
a lot of site models—you see them in my studio—that are not intended
for the client, but purely to help us gain understanding of the site. When
one of my buildings is built, I want it to always look like it is locked in to
the site, in the sense that it is fitted in the site as if it has always been there.
(I look to the ideas of Norberg-Shulz and Frampton.)36
And it might be noted that the Dinosaur Egg Museum explicitly involved Li’s
training of local workers as well, and a recognition of material limitations that
nevertheless informed a strategy of jointure. This is vernacularity that includes a
concern for tectonic excellence.
Another example: Liu Jiaping, based at the Xi’an University of Architecture
and Technology (XUAT), is now one of the most prominent architect-educators
in China, earning his reputation by securing millions of RMB from Chinese
government grants to develop sustainable dwellings for rural populations throughout
China. I have published elsewhere on his work in developing sustainable yaodong
cave dwellings in northern Shaanxi Province, specifically using Frampton’s
categories of “resistance” in interpreting Liu’s work.37 Many rural Chinese still live
in caves in this region of the country. Liu’s innovation—and this is an approach
he has now enacted in southern China, in Sichuan Province after the 2008
earthquake, and in rural areas outside of Lhasa, Tibet—is to retain local values and
forms but updated by sustainable practices. For instance, in developing the new
cave dwellings at Zhao Yuan Village in northern Shaanxi Province, Liu and his
team asked the citizenry to veto design proposals not to their liking. (The region
is historic because it is the culmination of the Long March, led by Mao Zedong,
1934–1935, when the fledgling Communist forces were fleeing Kuomintang
forces. Mao lived in the yaodong community there before his ascent to power.)
One significant outcome of this process was the retention of the signature curved
motif of original cave dwelling openings, which earlier design proposals had
covered up with greenhouse fronts for thermal purposes. The new structures
maintained a line of yaodong evolution that stretches back to possibly pre-Han days
(roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire). This is one example of how
Frampton’s call to comprehend a site’s “subsequent cultivation and transformation
across time” can be expressed in contemporary tectonics. More importantly, Liu’s
role is not only that of an architect, but architect-cultivator. The result is a
continuation of vernacularity, but with explicit attention to detail.
Another example: Sun Zhuo is an architect based in Shanghai and Beijing. Her
office, Art & Architecture Studio ZHUO, is the associated design partner, project
management consultant, and site supervisor for the Goethe Institute,38 which entails
the repurposing of an older structure in the now well-known 798 precinct in Beijing.
This precinct was once home to factories but has now been revitalized as Beijing’s
premier arts district. Zhou is representative of a coterie of young architects aiming

to integrate current practice with Chinese roots:
I think it is important to look back at traditional Chinese architecture, to

interpret the images and meanings of those spaces and lifestyles. In practice,
I wouldn’t imitate those images in any of my projects, but [I want to] recall
the feeling of being inside a symbolic and poetic space to link daily life with
the past.39
In the detail shown in Figure 6.5, past and present meet in her principle of
“transparency and openness,” in which the past is seen with the present, and the
traditional fluency of Chinese interior space is recalled. The design overcame the
program’s need for multiple small offices, encouraging social interaction in its place.
I cite Zhuo’s work because this is another example of an emerging sense of respect
for detail rooted in a desire to cultivate social (and in this case historical) awareness.
Perhaps her approach can best be explained by a formative experience she had
while traveling in Greece after her architectural training in China. As she scaled a
mountain, she had a moment when she could “see” beyond the summit, to the
other side. It was the first time she had a sense of composite architectural form,
that is, architecture as not something two dimensional, but full orbed. “I could
FIGURE 6.5 Sun Zhuo at an interior partition she designed for the Goethe Institute,
798 Art Precinct, Beijing.
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feel the form of the mountain!” she said, in recounting to me her experience. On
her flight back to China, she was mesmerized by the tops of the heads of the
passengers in the seats in front of her: just like at the summit of the mountain,
she was able for the first time to “see” beyond the tops of their heads.40 For Zhuo,
the technology-based training predominant in Chinese architecture schools did
not cultivate this kind of aesthetic sight. For her, it is key in capturing the age-
old aesthetic sensibility of qi expressed through materiality. She mentions calligraphy
as an example of expressing qi in figural gestures. “ ‘Science’ has killed this
tendency,” says Zhuo. So the calligraphic lilt is something she is seeking to recover
in her work. The transparency in detailing at the Goethe Institute is an expression
of her commitment to architecture as a multidimensional presence in the world,
rhyming and resonating with human being-in-the-world. It is an example of
cultivated vernacularity: the roughness of the original shell retained, the new
insertions carefully detailed, the historic fluency of Chinese interior space revived,
the rhythm of the new mullions explicitly inspired by Mondrian’s grids.
The Land
Any philosophy of architecture based on Chinese ideas must include the land. Pearl
Buck’s The Good Earth underlines how deeply ingrained land was in the Chinese
popular outlook. The life of the main character, Wang-Lung, is a parable of the
fortunes of countless millions of Chinese over the centuries. Land means stability
and identity; loss of land equals poverty and loss of identity. Set in the early twentieth
century, the novel concludes with the aged Wang-Lung pleading with his sons to
not sell the family land because “if you sell the land, it is the end.” The sons assure
him they will not sell, but smile knowingly to each other.41 The forsaking of the
rural family homestead for industrialized urban life is now an actual problem that
is at crisis proportions in China.
FIGURE 6.6 Eco-farm on Yang Cheng Lake, Kunshan (near Suzhou) by Dong Gong
and Vector Architects. This educational center encourages young people
to participate in agrarian activities as part of the motivation to activate life
in rural areas.
The question at hand is how land, or a sense of landed-ness, can remain integral
to the architectural project in China moving forward. By landed-ness I mean a
social sense of relatedness that has historically been horizontal, because relations
were intimately related to the land. Mencius said, “Humane government must begin
by defining the boundaries of land,” and he promoted the well-field system, nine
squares arranged in a tic-tac-toe layout—the pattern resembles the Chinese word
for well, jing3—in which the center square is collaboratively farmed for a tax yield
to the state. “In this way, the people live in affection and harmony.”42 As noted
in Chapter 1, Wu Liangyong has posited that Beijing’s gridded hutong sectors might
trace to this early land division. Certainly, the pattern is geometrically conducive
to the courtyard residence. I have suggested elsewhere that, because Confucian
ren-benevolence was typically expressed in these courtyard residences, its ritual
practice involved a spatial dimension; ren can only be ren when enacted in between
persons.43 Thus, as hierarchical as Confucian social relations were—e.g. emperor–
subject; father–son, and so on—it is a mistake to think of Confucian hierarchy as
being only vertical. Confucian social relations were, and are, enacted horizontally,
ethically charging the spaces in between social roles. And insofar as an entire city
is a courtyard residence writ large, we have the essential moral (because relational)
nature of the historic Chinese urban fabric. All of this begins with the land. Linking
the moral enactment of Confucian ritual with the well-field ideology gives content
to Frampton’s call for a “bounded” site in an architecture of resistance.44
How to retain this sense of landed-ness in the blatant verticality of China’s cities
(see Figure 5.10)? Here I suggest some ways. First is ensemble. Chinese architecture
as such was never really conceived of as individual structures, but as ensembles.45
The precinct is inseparable from the building. One senses this even today in the
many varieties of gates (men2) that are basic to the compositional logic of Chinese
urban fabrics; Chapter 1 touched on this. Social identity is still not indexed to
buildings as much as it is indexed to gates because it is the precinct it demarcates
that informs belonging. Once you are through the gate, you belong, and the world
you belong to is comprised of an ensemble of structures. Just prior to Deng Xiaoping,
the dan1 wei4, or work unit, was a modern expression that reinforced the ensemble
mentality. In addition to housing, these work units typically contained social services,
stores, and recreation facilities—a danwei was a world. Even though danwei practice
is now largely obsolete, the danwei mentality still persists in residential compounds,
office complexes, schools, and even commercial areas. Moving forward, embodying
ensemble entails retaining the multiple-structure character of places of belonging.
This again goes right to Frampton’s concerns about building the site: an ensemble
of structures defined as a distinct gated patch that nevertheless fits into the urban
fabric. The gate/precinct ontology has a horizontal sensibility, and I suggest the
social-interactional outflows of this horizontality work as a ballast against the physical
verticality of today’s high-rise residential towers. Western biases may judge these
gated areas as perhaps elitist. But to do so discounts the historic practice of urban
fabrics divided into various precincts as emblems of communal belonging.
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Second is interiority. The Chinese courtyard is an outcome of ensemble, which

creates spaces between structures conceived of as interior spaces even though they
are open to the sky. If you will, it relates to the literary-compositional nature of
Chinese figure-ground patterns. The Chinese courtyard’s interior bearing is not
only spatial, it is social, because it is the stage upon which family relations of whatever
scale are enacted. Ultimately these courtyards become subjectively interiorized as
the loci of home. How to maintain this sense of interiority in Chinese design?
This is a question moving forward. Walk into the enormous modernist buildings
now along Chang’an Avenue in Beijing; the large roofed-over atria with the sheer
glass walls may be bravura displays of glazed construction, but these roofed interior
spaces do not evoke the social interiority of historic Chinese courtyards. In Figure
6.7, people are dwarfed, surrounding offices are anonymously glazed, and the space
is quickly traversed to go somewhere else. This “courtyard” is interior without
interiority. It responds to an idea of grandeur befitting a capital city on the
borrowed terms of the Machine; but it captures nothing of the city’s cultural history
in its formal disposition.
The third consideration for a sense of landed-ness is fluid social horizontality. Steven
Holl’s Linked Hybrid housing project in Beijing displays some markers in this regard
that can be emulated for urban architecture in China moving forward (Figure 6.8).
Its ensemble character is readily apparent, consisting of towers linked by aerial
walkways. The open spaces evoke interiority; there is enough ground level diversity
FIGURE 6.7 Entrance atrium of office building on Chang’an Avenue, Beijing.

FIGURE 6.8 Linked Hybrid housing community in Beijing, by Steven Holl.
of shops and cafes to energize activity; they necessarily belong to the life of the
ensemble while demarcating the entire complex as a distinct patch in the urban
quilt. The raised walkways themselves may not generate a sense of community at
the upper levels; their actual “linkage” value lies in strengthening the visual unity
of a composition that nevertheless maintains a sense of openness. The project’s
precinct quality, thus, does not sacrifice a porosity that maximizes interchange
between inside and outside at the ground level. The project is a case study of how
identity of place can be achieved while minimizing the exclusivity that might be
implied by the traditional gate in modern times.
A fourth element of maintaining connection to the land can be termed the
homeward call. The Chinese term for “hometown” is lao3 jia1, and it connotes not
only rural environs but also something about the honesty of rootedness in the
agrarian land. (I have often noted that, in cocktail parties in the West, meeting
people often involves asking “What do you do?”; while in China, opening social
gambits typically inquire “Where are you from?”.) In an age of burgeoning urban
centers, the appeal of the countryside, as lao jia, remains an active factor in a person’s
sense of wellspring. One way for architecture to help slow the massive demographic
shift from rural to urban areas is to pay attention to the homeward call. Liu Jiaping’s
work has been noted above. When his team developed the new yaodong dwellings
in Zhao Yuan Village, Shaanxi Province, the hope was that the new “caves” would
draw back young people who had left for the city; the open country and agrarian
life were seen as attractions.46 Vector Architect’s Eco-farm, drawing young people
to participate in agrarian life, is another example (Figure 6.6).
At the Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, Professor Mengyuan Xu’s
team is designing an eco-agricultural retreat with private funding from the Baidu
Company. The 26.4 hectare project (62 acres) allows for retreat participants to
pick fruit, take in a “flower sea,” and live in retreat villas near water and forested
land. Projects such as this one resonate with a well-circulated saying formulated
by the current head of China, Xi Jinping: “Gazing towards the mountains, looking
at the waters, you experience nostalgia.” Professor Xu anchors his design theory
in the Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, often considered the most profound of this Daoist
philosopher’s “Inner Chapters.”47 The chapter is titled “Equalizing Assessments
of Things.”48 By “equalizing” things Zhuangzi means to say that categories of
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knowledge depend on one’s perspective: humans may consider Lady Li beautiful,

but fish dart away at the sight of her; it is impossible to distinguish between “this”
and “that” as fixed constructions; Mount Tai is small while the tip of hair is large.
And, famously, in dreaming of a butterfly, does one really know whether it is him
dreaming of it, or it dreaming of him? Returning to nature, then, is associated
with freeing one’s being from the categorical commitments of social life. It all
depends on perspective. Woven into this discourse is an embedded yearning to be
“one” with the cosmos:
The towering trees of the forest, a hundred spans around, are riddled with
indentations and holes—like noses, mouths and ears; like sockets, enclosures,
mortars; like ponds, like puddles . . . A light breeze brings a small harmony,
while a powerful gale makes for a harmony vast and grand. And once the
sharp wind has passed, all these holes return to their silent emptiness.49
This is the kind of thinking driving the eco-agricultural retreat project. Xu is

a professor of landscape architecture, and it is appropriate he is setting an example
for anchoring landscape design in ancient Chinese ideologies of landedness.
From As-is, to Surprise, to Power

The “as-is” condition in the correlative view (Figures 1–3a) is not philosophically
equal to the “existing” condition in the state of affairs depicted in Figures 1–3b.
The as-is condition has more weight. The very aim of the Eye/I in Figure 1.3b
is to improve existing conditions by human logical operations. In this sense the existing
condition is not the desirable one. But the as-is condition in the correlative view
is what our poet Wang Zhixi appreciates as “a million differences none strange.”
As-is, in other words, is itself dynamic; it constantly unfolds to the next as-is. The
Eye/I, insofar as it is the human element in the mix, participates more than it aims
to correct, or to improve upon, the array of a given presentation. This is largely
the philosophical basis for pattern over proportion in Chinese environmental
aesthetics, addressed in Chapter 3. Patterns unfold; proportions are imposed. At
least, proportions require the processing of materiality through human cognitive
operations.
Viewed in this way, the CCTV tower is simply an unfolding in the as-is-ness
of Beijing’s urban patterns. There it is, as the new as-is. Long-standing Daoist-
Buddhist sensibilities foster this view. Anne-Marie Broudehoux has noted that in
the extravagant alteration of the Beijing urban fabric in preparation for the 2008
Olympics—she calls this razing the spectacularization of Beijing—there was very
little protest by the local citizenry.50 On her criticalist view, this quietude is due
to government suppression, and is a negative reality. She notes that a small
symptom of protest can be seen in the funny monikers the locals devised for the
strange new buildings; for instance, likening the CCTV tower to a pair of pants.
But to simply label this as an act of protest overlooks the Chinese penchant for
colorful monikers in general as a pictographic way of language-ing the cosmos. The

Zhuangzi, for instance, is filled with funny monikers (e.g. Hunchback Limpleg,
Jar-sized Goiter, Uncle Dim Nobody, etc);51 to this day, the Zhuangzi is a prized
emblem of Chinese culture. To Bourdehoux’s point, no doubt opposition was
hushed. But quietude itself on the part of the citizenry is an embedded aspect of
Chineseness. And Daoist-Legalist-Mohist formulations of state power are by now
not so much political notions as they are ways of being for the Chinese people
(see more below). Indeed, a line of tanks confronting a single citizen during the
1989 Tiananmen incident is more derivable from Daoist-Legalist-Mohist ideas than
it is from the Confucian Analects (even though to not speak out against superiors
is certainly also ingrained in the Confucian outlook). Ideological genetics matter.
My point is simply that Chinese urban genius loci still reflects the tenets of Laozi,
Zhuangzi, Han Fei, and Mozi at subtler but very present levels, even as the explosion
of construction on the surface of things may seem a brash celebration of Baconian-
Cartesian impositions on nature. Of course it is now a mix (Figure 4.3). But for
the government to raze large tracts of land, and for the people to be silent, may
just be the way it is; it may not need a “solution” per se. The CCTV is simply accepted
as the next as-is condition. Zhuangzi:
The formless takes on a form; the formed veers back to the formless: this is
something everyone knows and need not be managed in any way when it
is about to happen. It is something everyone has a theory about, but when
it arrives there is no more theorizing, and when there is theorizing that means
it has not yet arrived.52
Chan Buddhism adds an additional twist to as-is. In brief, as-is simply is the
enlightened condition, and the novice is often jarred into this realization by the
gong1 an4.
The Master ascended the hall. A monk asked, “What is the basic idea of the
Law preached by the Buddha?” The Master lifted up his swatter. The monk
shouted, and the Master beat him.53
Prizing the as-is condition as itself virtuous is much less emphasized, if even
found, in European ideas. Certainly, it is not primarily operative in the constant
shifts of stylistic change addressed in Chapter 2. The ideals those styles symbolize
are by definition not the as-is. And so one comes to realize that deriving
architectural theory from Chinese philosophical threads can lead to an
accomodationalism that cuts against the very grain of what Western theorizing is
for, which is to advance existing conditions towards “better” ones. Zhuangzi would
ask, “Better for whom, or what?”
Better, of course, for human beings in the world. If the gong an is one kind of
surprise, Chan Buddhism offers other kinds of surprises. The surprise of sudden
enlightenment can come not only by an unexpected bonk on the head; perhaps
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FIGURE 6.9 CCTV Tower under construction in Beijing in 2005, by Rem Koolhaas
and OMA.
more preferable is the surprise of “the singing of a bird, the blooming of a flower,
or a drop of rain.”54 The literati gardens of southern China particularly exhibit
surprising twists and turns, borrowed perspectives, and layered views through latticed
windows, all to stir sudden enlightenment (see Figures 1.5b, 3.6). The Daoist-
Buddhist outlook, then, provides for a range of theories, not only those that prize
the as-is, but also those that celebrate strategically staged settings. As with all major
lines of religious thought, great varieties of empirical forms can be derived from
them.
Points of view from Daoist-Buddhist moorings can further shift to theories of
political power. I have already noted that the leading legalist thinker, Han Fei, was
a student of Xunzi. But Han Fei also had Daoist roots; his writings cite directly
from the Daodejing.55 If my students are any indication, Daoism is often roman-
ticized as some sort of “back-to-nature” sentiment that accords with “green
design.” In truth, in original Daoism “heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the
myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw
dogs.”56 In China, even in Confucian China, political power has always been charac-
terized by an element of brute authority. The ruler treating his subjects with ren-
benevolence was rarely enacted in practice. It is not the exception, but the rule,
that top-down political power can be exercised at will with little objection from
the populace. Besides the razing of major tracts of Beijing for the 2008 Olympics,
another example in architectural terms is the rote relocation of numerous towns

along the Yangtze River to accommodate the Three Gorges Dam. So the harshness
with which the CCTV tower imposes itself onto the city fabric does not necessarily
derive from a foreign ideology; it is in grain with Daoist-Legalist exercises of power
that have deep roots in Chinese cultural history.
Chinese architectural theory moving forward must find ways to critically
manage these elements of as-is-ness, of surprise, of expressions of rote power.
An appraisal of current developments—such as the CCTV project—cannot be
thoroughly performed without an awareness of this philosophical background.
I do not know if the Rem Koolhaases, or the Herzogs and de Meurons, or other
foreign “star-chitects” who have built in China, have considered their surprising
and fabulous forms from this angle; to wit that their exertions can all be
accommodated in the groundwork provided by Chinese philosophy.
Notes
1 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London and Sydney: Pluto Press,
1987), 16–30 (16).
2 Here Frampton is citing Mario Botto’s “building the site.” See Frampton, “Towards a
Critical Regionalism,” in op. cit., 26.
3 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space
(University of Chicago Press, 2005), 118.
4 Yuehping Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Abingdon, UK:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 32.
5 Ronald Knapp, “Chinese Villages as Didactic Texts,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Landscape,
Culture, and Power in Chinese Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Institute of
East Asian Studies, 2001), 110–127.
6 Author interview with Liu Xiaohu at the Bamboo Restaurant, Wuhan, May 24, 2015.
7 Cited from Joseph Cho Wang, The Chinese Garden (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
1998), 24.
8 Ibid., 16–17.
9 Wang Shu, Imagining the House (Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2012/2013), no
pagination; the statement appears in the “A House as Sleep,” section 1.
10 Haun Saussy, “The Prestige of Writing: Wen2, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography,” Sino-
Platonic Papers 75:2 (February, 1997), 2.
11 “The Complete Works of Chu Hsi” (Zhu Xi) 59, in Wing-Tsit Chan, ed., A Sourcebook
in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), 623.
12 Cheng Hao, “Selected Sayings, 23,” in ibid., 534.
13 Wang Yang-ming (Wang Anming), “An Inquiry into the Great Learning,” in ibid., 660.
14 Wang Fu-Chih (Wang Fuzhi), “Surviving Works of Wang Fu-chih,” in ibid., 695–696.
Wang is quoting from the ancient “Doctrine of the Mean,” Section 25.
15 John Ruskin, “The Virtues of Architecture” in Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (New York: Bryan,
Taylor & Company, 1894), 49.
16 Aristotle, Nichmachean Ethics, 1103a31, 1103b5. Cited by Wan Junren in “Contrasting
Confucian Virtue Ethics and Macintyre’s Aristotelian Virtue Theory,” in Robin Wang,
ed., Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2004), 149–150.
17 Ibid., 146.
Century Carpenter’s Manual “Lu Ban Jing” (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 55–61.
166 Future
19 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Dover, 1960), II.1,
2, 42.
20 Xunzi 23, “Human Nature is Bad,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, trans. Eric Hutton
21 “Mencius says: people’s nature is good, but they all wind up losing their nature and original
state. I say: if it is like this, then he is simply mistaken.” Xunzi, trans. Eric L. Hutton
22 Xunzi 19, “Discourse on Ritual,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, op. cit., 205.
23 Ibid., 201.
24 A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Dao (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 245.
The word qing is defined by Graham as follows: “the ch’ing of X is that without which
the name X would not fit”; the concept is close to the Aristotelian “essence,” 99.
25 Xunzi 19, in Xunzi: The Complete Text, op. cit., 212.
26 Confucius, Analects 1.12, in Tsit-Chan, op.cit, 21.
27 Xunzi 9, in Xunzi: The Complete Text, op. cit., 73.
28 Ibid., 78.
29 Ibid., 76.
30 Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, quoted in Daralice Boles, “Reordering the Suburbs,” Progressive
Architecture 5 (1989), 78–91.
31 Analects 2.12, James Legge’s translation in Confucius: Confucian Analects, the Great
Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean (New York: Dover, 1971), 150.
32 Analects 2.4, in Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 22.
33 Tao Te Ching 11, trans. D.C. Lau (Penguin, 1963), 67.
34 From “The Platform Scripture,” in Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 434.
35 Author interview with Li Baofeng, May 22, 2015, 11am to noon, HUST architecture
building cafe.
36 Ibid.
37 Liu Jiaping, David Wang, and Yang Liu, “An Instance of Critical Regionalism: New
Yaodong Dwellings in North Central China,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements
Review 8:2, 63–70.
38 The project is in cooperation with AS&P (Albert Speer and Partner GmbH), Shanghai
office. AS&P is the commissioned design office for the project.
39 Email from Sun Zhuo to author, November 17, 2015.
40 Author interview with Sun Zhou in Beijing, October 20, 2015.
41 Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York: Pocket Books, 1958), 340.
42 Mencius, 3A:3, in Wing-Tsit Chan, op. cit., 68.
43 David Wang, “A Form of Affection: Sense of Place and Social Structure in the Chinese
Courtyard Residence,” Journal of Interior Design 32:1 (September, 2006), 28–39.
44 See Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” in op. cit., 24.
45 Here I want to make note of a student of mine from years ago, Aaron Pasquale, for the
term “ensemble.” Aaron traveled with me to China (Tibet, actually, on a trip hosted by
Dr. Liu Jiaping), and this led him to take a hiatus from his architecture studies by staying
on at the Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology as an English instructor.
46 Liu Jiaping, David Wang, and Yang Liu, “An Instance of Critical Regionalism: New
Yaodong Dwellings in North Central China,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements
Review 8:2, 63–70.
47 Email from Mengyuan Xu to author, November 16, 2015.
48 This rendering is by Brook Ziporyn in his Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings (Hackett
Publishing, 2009), 9.
49 Ibid., 9.
50 Anne-Marie Broudehoux, “Images of Power: Architectures of the Integrated Spectacle
at the Beijing Olympics,” Journal of Architectural Education 63:2, 52–62.
51 From Zhuangzi, Chapter 5, op. cit., 33–38.
52 Zhuangzi 22 in Brook Ziporyn, op. cit., 89.
53 “The Recorded Conversations of Zen Master I-Hsuan,” in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit.,
445.
54 Wing Tsit-Chan, “The Zen (Chan) School of Sudden Enlightenment,” in ibid., 428.
55 See Wing Tsit-Chan’s commentary on “The Han Fei Tzu,” in ibid., 261.
56 Tao Te Ching 5, op. cit., 61.
7
TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTURE
OF THE NEW VIRTUALISM
We are at a notable juncture in the history of architecture, taken globally. Not

since the Industrial Revolution has there been an ideological shift impacting
architecture and built environments as the one we are in the midst of. I am of
course referring to computational design. I term this new way of design thinking
and praxis the New Virtualism. This chapter defines this term and sees in it an
opportunity to foreground Chinese philosophical lines for theory. Let me begin
by identifying four desires the powers of the computer arouse in us vis-à-vis
architecture:
Desire 1: material fluidity. Computational design arouses a desire so dormant in
previous eras we did not know it was there, at least not in the realm of architecture.
It is the desire for materiality to be instantly malleable such that the fluidity of
human being-ness is reflected in ever-altering material settings in real time. I enter
a room, and the thermal environment adjusts to suit me because it is “smart.” This
is even now fairly standard. I am sad, and my room changes its contours to embrace
me, to assure me it’s going to be okay. This kind of mass customization is not yet
possible. Not yet. But even now researchers are erasing interfaces between
electrical-chemical brain waves and the digital world.1 This is on the one hand.
On the other, nanotechnology is developing smart materials aimed to produce:
buildings that will “grow”: It is interesting to think of architecture as a

“growing” environment that evolves according to different respective codes;
Responsive Architecture means that personalization of nanoarchitectural spaces
will be a likely benefit giving occupants greater flexibility and choice.2
As these two extremes merge, a room that morphs to embrace me becomes

more likely. I suggest this fluidity of materiality is where the architecture of the
New Virtualism desires to head. It gives Heidegger’s being-in-the-world a new
phenomenological depth, to wit the New Virtualism makes the world we are being-
Towards the New Virtualism 169
in dynamic, such that the being of the world and human being dance together,
pirouetting through time. We see this desire in David Fisher’s Dynamic Tower
project in Dubai, in which a 40-tier structure undulates in the wind much as a
plant would.3 Greg Lynn’s theory of “versioning”4 intimates this desire. Or,
among William Mitchell’s five traits of “E-topias” from 1999, the last one is soft
transformation. All he meant by this term back then was for existing built stock
to be rapidly adaptable to meet new programmatic needs. But the desire for rapidity
was probably for something far more immediate, maybe too magical to responsibly
put in academic writing in 1999: immediate transformation of physical forms. But
here is Patrik Schumacher’s description of computational design (italics mine):
the essential identity of the parametric design resides in the malleable object’s
topology rather than its momentary determinate shape . . . the parametric design
model is conceived as a network of relations or dependencies . . . the design can
progress while simultaneously maintaining the malleability to adapt to changing
requirements as new information is fed into the design process.5
When we look today at the growing numbers of computer-enabled architectural

constructions—perhaps beginning with Gehry’s Experience Music Project, or Ma
Yansong’s work (Figure 7.1)—if we simply receive them as fixed constructions,
however fabulous their physical contours, we miss something of the desire that is
behind them. That desire is for form to not be fixed at all, but to be fluid. In
Gehry’s case you can sense it in his initial sketches for his projects, of which every
fixed outcome is just a little less exciting, because a little more frozen, than the
first figural conceptions. As for Ma’s work, well, let’s just have the form fly over
us. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It is the architecture of the New Virtualism. I began
Chapter 1 of this book with Wang Xizhi standing in his pavilion and watching
geese in a “rimless” correlative world, a world constantly percolating with change
(Figure 1.1). Here I suggest that this penchant for an ever-altering dynamism
in New Virtualist design thinking brings us full circle back to “a million trans-
formations, and none strange.”
Desire 2: organic generation. We no longer want our buildings just to be built;
we desire for them to be grown. Computational design shifts the focus from physical
form to genetic generation. A fixed form at any given moment is now more
happenstance, but how forms come to be opens up an entirely new domain of design
thinking. Dennis Dollens:
Information from plant and animal morphology, algorithms and biochemistry

mediated through the designer’s vision and mediated again through software
and digital fabrications is creating a species of biomimetic ideas that index
nature while propelling design and architecture into the living, organic world.6
Dollens holds that ideas themselves are processes of nature. As such, they can
take generative paths that may not be limited to the confines of a Cartesianly
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FIGURE 7.1 Floating Island over WTC site, New York, 2001 (Ma Yansong, masters
thesis project).
prescribed procedure or form. The point is that computational design thinking

shifts from a product teleology to an in-process orientation. And that process is
conceived of as an organic outflow, from seeds to forms, in an aesthetically
indeterminate sense more than in a mathematically determinate one. This
development fits comfortably within Daoist emphases on process over product:
Tao produces the ten thousand things / Virtue fosters them / Matter gives
them physical form / The circumstances and tendencies complete them /
Therefore the ten thousand things esteem Tao and honor virtue.7
I will return to the “virtue” aspect shortly. But here in Laozi, matter and physical
form are contingent, sandwiched between the ephemeral Dao, on the one hand
as a primordial substrate, and “circumstances and tendencies” on the other, which
are relevant precisely because they are not fixed. In computational design, social-
actional parameters can be related to physical-material parameters to generate novel
expressions of built forms, as if organically. Thus Sean Ahlquist and Achim Menges
note that, in computational procedures, “form is a consequence of interaction and
interaction is a realization of actions applied across a series of interconnected units.”8
Single buildings aside, an entire city can be generated out of various parametric
seeds that combine moral with physical factors now intertwined in one as-if organic
process. Imagine Confucian social protocols written into a set of parametric inputs;
let this set of moral actions be one genetic seed in a computational process. Other
seeds contain inputs for geographic particulars; for climate patterns; for optimal
energy consumption; for best-practice adjacency relationships between business,
residential, commercial, and leisure; and for optimal transportation flows of all kinds.
What results is a Confucian-infused urban entity that can perhaps truly lay claim
to having the li3-principle, so prized by neo-Confucianism, operating throughout
all of the particulars of a city. Computational design not only grows the urban
form(s); it sustains the operation of a complex urban entity as an organism. Tom
Verebes of the University of Hong Kong:
Urban patterns most often play out various constraints related to the interface
between technological and cultural conventions . . . the city is the result of
the association of multiple systems which negotiate each other; in other words,
the city is inherently a product of parametric processes.9
Thus Mary Polites at Shanghai Tonji’s College of Design and Innovation notes
that it may well be urban planning that truly benefits from the generative powers
of computational design, as opposed to more fixed-form buildings, however
fabulous.10
Desire 3: distributed ontology. The computer enables a desire to be many places
at once; it enables a distributed ontology. Factors of distance and time, already
substantially overcome by the technology of the Industrial Revolution, are further
conquered by the computer. We are now only seeing the beginnings of distributed
human presence. Social networking platforms create communities across cyberspace,
freed of physical locale (WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter).
Virtual meeting sites, from GoToMeeting to dating sites to Skype, create illusions
of presence without the need for embodiment. We shop online (Amazon). We
play games online, often in large communities in real time (Massively Multiplayer
Online Roleplaying Games). We pay bills online. We consume news online. These
days we can’t even get lost because we are online (GPS). As I write this early in
2016, many pundits are predicting this as the year that virtual reality “takes off”:
“Virtual-reality devices immerse users in three-dimensional worlds, letting them
look around and feel as if they’re in another place.”11 This is to say that architecture
moving forward may not be limited to location-specific physical forms.
One outcome of this digitally distributed way of life is the necessary redefinition
of “site.” OMG’s Seattle Public Library and the CCTV in Beijing (Figure 6.9) are
interchangeable insofar as site is concerned. “World cities”—Dubai, Shanghai,
Los Angeles—achieve their world status in part because their ontologies and their
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FIGURE 7.2 Social media activity uniting Shenzhen and Hong Kong as one cyber-
connected entity. See also http://oscity.eu/projects/babel/.
localities no longer correlate. It remains to be seen how this placeless-ness impacts

human well-being in the long run. But one reason the judgment is pending is how
the new connectedness stirs a sense of wholeness previously enabled by physical
objects: the satisfaction experienced in building proportions, the centeredness of
public squares by way of monuments, and even the sublimity of skyscrapers. This
new sense of wholeness is non-empirical. When it cries out for representation, it
is possible only by digital technology. Figure 7.2 is a still frame from a video by
architect and computer programmer Mark van der Net. The video maps the
constantly morphing activity of social media connections in Shenzhen and Hong
Kong,12 making evident just how much these two Chinese cities are one entity.
“By visualizing it in real time I am trying to grasp what it is . . . we are doing
online, what kind of society it entails . . . and how it will be reflected in urban
design.”13 This sense of non-empirical connectedness impacts design thinking, so
that cyber connectivity ultimately finds new ways of aesthetic expression for both
beauty and utility. Corning’s “A Day Made of Glass” videos, readily available on
line, still stir the imagination in this regard: Two physicians a world apart operate
on the same patient, as if in the same room; schoolchildren go on a fieldtrip in
the forest and see “real” dinosaurs.14 An architecture of the New Virtualism traffics
in “realities” in which large spans of distance and time are compressed into virtual
simultaneity, and an illusion of human presence is distributed spatially and
temporally.
We cannot know the outcomes of the desire to distribute presence, just as a
denizen of a pre-Industrial Revolution world would not know what to do if
confronted by Dubai. I often say to my students that when we can email a pizza,
the world would be radically changed. Just think: roads would be gone, for one.
The Industrial Revolution converges and aggregates; the Cyber Revolution disperses
and distributes. A distributed ontology leads to radical rethinking of what
“sustainability” can mean.
Desire 4: multiplexity. Computational design makes obsolete perhaps the most well-
known (even though the least understood) rubric of the Machine Age: form follows
function. In its place is a desire for, what? For a kind of mysterious wizardry—and
all wizardry is mysterious—in which multiple functions are housed in one form.
What the form is, is non-essential. At least, cyber-based design thinking frees
concerns for affordance relationships between the human body and objects of the
physical world. Perhaps the best example is the most ubiquitous New Virtualist object
of all, the smartphone. This simple little box houses countless operations: books, music,
calendar, camera, GPS; these are the most basic. And oh yes, a telephone. But not
only is the telephone function no longer obvious in the form, no function is obvious
in this little form. New Virtualist objects are multiplexic, meaning they dexterously
serve many functions while not “looking” like any of them. So New Virtualist design
doesn’t have to mean fabulous curves or outrageous forms; it can also be a simple
box. This disjuncture alone—the severing of form from function—is enough to
revolutionize design thinking. Much of this chapter was written in Beijing: the
National Theatre, the “Ice Cube” Aquatic Center, SOHO Beijing, and of course
the CCTV . . . none of these “look” like what they do. And yet below I suggest
that the organic dexterity of computational design may well return us to Sullivan’s
original vision when he coined “form ever follows function.”15
Multiplexity is evidence of a shift in how built forms are analogized. When
buildings were informed by the human body (e.g. the Parthenon) or the machine
(e.g. the Eiffel Tower), it made sense to associate functions with empirical looks,
because the human body and the machine are themselves empirical objects. Design
thinking therefore followed suit: the measure of design quality largely derives from
how an object affords an intended use. In the late 1970s the psychologist James
Gibson first said: “An elongated object, especially if weighted at one end and
graspable at the other, affords hitting or hammering.”16 In the late 1980s Donald
Norman tried to build on Gibson’s insights specifically for design: “the appearance
of [an object] could provide the critical clues required for its proper operation.”17
But the expanding powers of cyber connectivity changed the body-to-object
relationship, so much so that the architecture of the New Virtualism does not
analogize from a physical-empirical object; it shifts the enabling base of design to
something like the mind, which can mysteriously multitask many functions at once
(much of which we don’t even consciously know is being “tasked”). The MIT
Media Lab is a leader in mind-digital interface research. A survey of its 2015 projects
reveals many references to mind (e.g. mindful photons, body-mind well-being,
mind-theoretic planning for robots, etc.).18 Indeed, the project list is available on
a Media Lab site titled Open Mind Common Sense.19 This shift in design analogy
from a physical paradigm to the mind profoundly impacts design thinking and
practice. For example, as noted by Michael Speaks, if rapid prototyping can
instantly produce what we think, it portends an “intelligence after theory.”20 This
174 Future
is to say that there is now no gap between what the mind thinks and the
materialization of what is thought. And thinking can be multiplexic. Such diversity,
and rapidity, tends not to reify in single-function forms. Hence the designed objects
of the New Virtualism are mutliplexic; they express the desire for the reification
of instant thought. Perhaps the downside is that much thinking in general tends
to be provisional, so New Virtualist architecture may leave us with many oddly
exuberant designs that amount to no more than provisional ideas stuck in physical
forms. But the upside is that cyber-enabled design may ultimately result in no
physical forms at all; well, at least fewer physical forms (e.g. from Blockbuster
to Netflix; from Borders to Amazon; from tomes of phone books to none at all).
A New Virtualist world may well be a more sustainable one.
The Computer-cyber Epiphore

Some years ago I defined the New Virtualism in this way:
The driving force (or instinct) behind the design of objects of all scales that
essentially derives from how cyber technology is redefining the human
relationship to nature. This driving force . . . is subsumable in the object of
the computer, not in the sense of its physical dimensions, but in the sense
of its paradigmatic form emphasizing its cyber connectivity. Following
Tzonis and Lefaivre, this computer-as-paradigmatic object is called the
computer-cyber epiphore, and its varied influence on design and research is
termed the New Virtualism.21
My reference to Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre relates to their article

“The Mechanical Body versus the Divine Body: The Rise of Modern Design
Theory.”22 In that essay they examined the impact of the positivist spirit on
architectural design thinking, specifically in seventeenth-century France. Their essay
addressed the shift in epiphoric objects, from the human body as the “archaic”
epiphore, to the machine as the modern epiphore. They situated this shift in Jean-
Baptiste Colbert’s seminal efforts to recast the French economy in positivist terms.
More importantly, they highlighted the intimate relationship between architectural
theory—or better: how architecture is theorized—and the general percolations of
culture at any given time. In Colbert’s day, the scientific revolution sought to
redefine all of life in measurable constructs. Rules had to be discovered for everything
“from poems to bridges, from porticoes to astronomical instruments and from
bastions to tapestries.”23 Thus architecture had also to be subsumed under the regime
of measurable rules.
What exactly is an epiphoric object, as exemplified in the human body (archaic)
and the machine (modern)? Tzonis and Lefaivre offered this definition:
Epiphoric objects . . . are everyday objects which, by entering into the

argumentation, present in a “stenographic” way the framework in use. Thus
the complex of logical rules, epistemological and deontic statements . . . are

all condensed in simple form. By accepting an epiphoric object in an argu-
mentation, one accepts a conceptual framework in its entirety, which means
not only an idea of the work as it is, but also as it can be and should be.24
A simple comparison of the height of the Parthenon (13.725 meters)25 and that
of the Eiffel Tower (324 meters)26 underlines the difference between the two
epiphores. In the archaic system, buildings were extensions of the human body,
as expounded definitively by Vitruvius. The human body informed an unreflective
conceptual framework that dictated what architecture was and what it should be.
But the machine epiphore enormously extended the powers of the body, to the
point that the machine substituted the body in the way designers thought about
nature and the social world they can create. The gargantuan size of the Eiffel Tower
would have been unfathomable to the worldview of the human body epiphore.
Indeed, Parisians hated it when Eiffel first built it. But try taking it away from
them now. This shift in preference is the result of a shift in habituation from the
human body epiphore to the machine epiphore. The “everyday objects” of the
body and the machine, then, stand in for unreflective ways of thinking about design,
and about life in general.
Tzonis and Lefaivre published their article in 1975. I write this 40 years later,
in 2015–16. On the scale of epiphoric shifts, any delta of 40 years is not much; after
all, from Classical Greece to Tzonis and Lefaivre, just two epiphoric objects held
sway in Greco-European design theory. But this 40-year difference is significant
because it is the time when a third epiphoric object emerged: the computer. As
with the previous two epiphores, it is not the physical form of the computer that
enforces its epiphoric hegemony; the key resides in the unreflective mode of thinking
that simply accepts the powers of cyber connectivity as unexceptional facts of nature.
The computer stands in stenographically as the visual emblem of this default way
of seeing and thinking.
Consider the two images in Figure 7.3: Figure 7.3a is a computer map of the
level of cellphone usage over Rome’s Termini train station. It is similar to many
maps of cyber activity, such as those of the World Wide Web available on any
Google search. Unlike the Cartesian grid, the fundamental disposition of these
configurations is not orthogonal. They are fluid, made of connections going every
which way. The number of lines is not the point; the collaborative connectivity,
organically emerging all the time, is where the value lies. Unlike the Cartesian grid within
which we have been, and still are, situated—and unlike the machine epiphore
derived from Cartesian thinking that has so discombobulated Chinese civilization
since the nineteenth century—these lines of cyber connectivity are indeed going
right through us, right now. They are ephemerally ubiquitous. This is why I have
suggested that Figure 7.3a depicts the “soup” designers are now swimming in; it
is the existential “cyber sea” in which we all dwell, and of which we all imbibe.27
It is this habituation in the cyber sea that makes something such as the Bird’s
Nest Olympic Stadium not only legible as an idea, but also pleasurable as a form,
176 Future
FIGURE 7.3a Computer map of the level of cellphone usage at Rome’s Termini train
station on a given day.
FIGURE 7.3b The “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, Beijing, by Herzog and de
Meuron, 2003.
to us (Figure 7.3b). We look at that thing and, perhaps without being able to explain
it, we have a sense that it “looks like us.” Why does it look like us? It looks like
us because we are denizens of the cyber sea. The lines of the building evoke the
cyber lines of connectivity running through us. In Figures 7.2 and 7.3 we sense
intimations and connotations of something constantly shifting, something constantly
adapting, something “real-time” rather than fixed, something organic; in fact,
something sentient. All of these intimations inform New Virtualist design thinking.
Now, when Wang Xizhi looks out from the Orchid Pavilion and sees a million
differences none strange, his enjoyment derives from being in the “soup” of the
Chinese correlative cosmos. But couldn’t he also be in the soup of the cosmos of
Figure 7.2 or Figure 7.3a? Both emphasize spontaneity; both emphasize serendipity.
Both are vastly extended; indeed, both are “rimless.”
Other similarities: Because both of their natures are fluid—or better, because
both are fluidly natural—both de-emphasize disciplinary distinctions. Recall that
one of the impacts of the machine epiphore upon China (because, again, that’s
what it was) was the emergence of classificatory labels; China didn’t have profes-
sional architects—it didn’t even have “architecture” as a theoretical construct—
until the European influx.
It is significant, in this regard, that Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize winner, calls
his office Amateur Studio; although, ironically, Wang Shu’s is probably the farthest
away from a cyber-based design practice. It is complicated, but it all holds together
in a way: the computer-cyber epiphore, the loss of disciplinary distinctions for fluidly
related collaborative teams, the use of calligraphy to spur design thinking, calligraphy
and qi, spontaneity, constantly emerging connectivity, the lines of the Bird’s Nest,
the lines of calligraphy, the calligraphic lilt, amateur studio. They are all of a piece.
The “amateur” does not denote less than an architectural professional; it connotes
more than the restrictions of a set of professional activities. It is about architecture
that grows out of the multivarious engagements of life, none of which is
“professional” in the restrictive sense.
At any rate, more and more literature now forecasts the blurring of disciplinary
boundaries as cyber connectivity increases. Elisa Giaccardi provides a survey of this
literature and subsumes it under the heading of metadesign, understood as “a
cultural development exploring the new design space engendered by information
technologies” that yields “more open and evolving systems of interaction.” She
posits four traits of this emerging “design space”: (1) focus on process rather than
“fixed structures,” (2) fluid rather than prescriptive design methods, (3)
environments that evolve, and (4) “mutual and open processes,” all of which are
characterized by fluidity of boundaries.28
The Calligraphic Lilt (2)

In Chapter 6, I suggested the calligraphic lilt as a trait that should be recovered in
an architecture derived from ancient Chinese ideas of human being-in-the-world.
To recount, historically, Chinese cultural environments were calligraphized worlds
178 Future
in which the qi of all things found fluid expression through the calligrapher by
way of writing that festooned entryways, gardens, interior spaces, posters, and so
on. Indeed, calligraphy informed the design of entire town plans, as Ronald Knapp
has reported.29 I also noted in Chapter 6 that the calligraphic lilt does not necessarily
mean curvilinear forms, and even as I now address how the computer-cyber
epiphore perhaps does yield curved forms in the examples below, the observations
I made earlier are still the bases of the calligraphic lilt. Put another way, curvilinear
forms, even if produced by the computer, may not necessarily capture the
calligraphic spirit. The key factor is the fusing of nature with material production
into one seamless, because seemingly organic, operation, from conception to
empirical expression. In this regard, Wang Shu’s use of old tiles in the walls of his
buildings at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and also in his Ningbo
Museum (Figure 6.2b), seamlessly bridge past with present. They beautifully
override the turmoil of the decades—perhaps about a century and a half—during
which the machine epiphore brought loss of apperception to China and produced
so much architecture of little aesthetic honesty. In this regard, the metadesign enabled
by the computer also resists the mechanical spirit; it returns the ability to generate
forms as if organically and deepens the connection between calligraphy and design
expression. The intimations of organic generation in the cyber epiphore
effortlessly—which is to say, by actionless action, or wu2 wei2—yields empirical
forms that rhyme comfortably with the fluidity of the calligraphic spirit. In a project
proposal linking Hong Kong with Shenzhen, Tom Verebes and his team discerned
this linkage in their design proposal for the Liantang–Heung Yuen Wai Boundary
Terminal (Figure 7.4). And they explicitly invoke calligraphy:
The graphic qualities of Chinese calligraphy . . . helps express the connections

between these two cities, two geographies, two systems, as a fluid transitional
space in which the identifiable characteristics of each side are concurrently
associated yet distinguished . . . This proposal aims to synthesize the categories
of the artificial and the natural through an emergent ecological paradigm, in
which man-made, “mineral” urbanism is no longer conceived of as being
in opposition with the natural, “biological” environment, but rather as fused
in a symbiotic association of mobile dynamic forces and interactions.30
This fusing of the biological with the artificial is a persistent feature of emerging
architectural practice in China. I am suggesting that it is the renaissance of the
calligraphic spirit in the aesthetic desires of some leading practitioners. Figure 7.5
shows a model of a Daoist museum, in Sichuan Province, by Pei Zhu. In my
interview with him in Beijing, the architect is careful to say that the conception
and initial design sketches for his projects come to him in traditional (non-
computer-based) ways; then software takes over to develop the design iterations.
But it is not the software programs of computer-based practice that produces
calligraphic expressions. It is, rather, the stenographic way the cyber epiphore
reconstitutes design thinking and design process to facilitate expressions such as
FIGURE 7.4 Liantang–Heung Yuen Wai Boundary Terminal between Hong Kong
SAR and Shenzhen. The calligraphic lilt, that is, a physical form
expressing the fluid qi of nature flowing through the artist, resonates
with the powers of computation to generate organicist forms. Hong
Kong Parametric Design Association, DOTA, and Ocean CN.
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FIGURE 7.5 Daoist Museum (model), Sichuan Province. Studio Pei Zhu, Beijing.
the Daoist museum. My point is that it is a way of conceiving design that is

sympathetic to qi-based modes of expression that resonates with the gestalt of
traditional Chinese ways of being and making. The calligraphic sense here is
expressed not by festooning surfaces with written script, but rather by blurring
human with natural production, giving the illusion that the resulting form is an
outgrowth of a single organic process, a follow-through of qi into empirical form.
Pei Zhu enumerates themes in his design that comfortably fit with the calligraphic
urge: leaving blank space, incorporating indefinite space, drawing inspiration from
Chinese painting’s penchant for suggestion by incorporating the incomplete:31
The Daoist Museum is a design that is continuous and homogenous within

the landscape. This landscape is without boundaries and limitations that forces
a path of exploration. . . . it offers multiple ways to explore personal and
cultural ideas and reconnects them to natural and archaic forces.32
The Virtue in the New Virtualism

The word “virtue” and its cognate “virtual” are serendipitous when applied to the
Chinese case. I am thinking of the technical term de2 meaning, well, virtue. In
Chinese philosophy de does not only mean a certain quality of character, as in a
virtuous person. The Daoists conceived of de as the essential motive power of the
unknowable Dao, which power is the key to virtuous living. Hence moral character
is indexed to natural process itself. This is why de is the middle character of the
Daoist text Dao De Jing; hence Arthur Waley titles his translation of the Daoist
text The Way and Its Power.33 But this understanding of de was not limited to the
Daoists. In Chapter 2, I noted the “moral causality” inherent in the Confucian
outlook: “A ruler who governs his state by de is like the north polar star, which
remains in its place while all the other stars revolve around it.”34 In both cases, de
is resident in the essential nature of a thing, and if human actions could effortlessly
express this de, society would be at peace. The point is that Chinese philosophy
holds that a natural process is essentially a virtuous one. It is a new basis to assess
what is good in design: an organic process in which computational parameters yield
optimal outcomes independent of the architect’s subjective (or “objective”)
preferences. At the level of smart cities, in which entire urban areas are wired such
that traffic jams are prevented, energy consumption is continuously minimized,
human movement is optimized, and emergencies are prevented or optimally
tended to; this can be a kind of organicist simulacrum of de-virtue.
In this regard, New Virtualist design fulfills Sullivan’s original theoretical intention
for “form ever follows function.” When he coined this term, Sullivan did not mean
that every object must “look like” what it was mechanically designed to do. The
rotary dial telephone is a good example: a disk with holes in it for your fingers
and a headset formed to fit mouth and ears. Form follows function. But this is not
what Sullivan had in mind. For Sullivan “form ever follows function” was more
of a desire, and it is in fact closer to the Daoist-Confucian understanding of de-
virtue: birds soaring, trees growing, the grandeur of the mountains; each is what
it is because it beautifully expresses its de, therefore the tall office building should
also express its natural de. Hence in looking at the fluent form of Ma’s Floating
Island (Figure 7.1), there are similarities with the ornamental panels Sullivan is famous
for in his office buildings. In both cases, architecture is an outgrowth of life forces
welling up from within the ontology of the process, not as something imposed by
rules from the outside.
Earlier chapters touched on the conflict between ti3 (substance) and yung4
(function) in Chinese intellectual circles during the European ideological onslaught
in the late Qing period. To review: the Chinese rationale was to preserve the ti-
substance of their own cultural values and practices, but also to adopt Western
technological learning as a matter of expedience to meet all of the yung of modern
life. What they found was the embrace of Western ways left no “there” for ti.
China today is awash with technological capability. But the mechanical paradigm
has never been—and, I suggest, never will be—totally at home given Chinese
culture’s historic moorings in the correlative outlook. There is always something
about her cultural bent, her built environments, the way things fit together or don’t
(see my thoughts on vernacularity in Chapter 6, or the façade-ism noted in
Chapter 4) that feels not totally at home in a cosmos ruled by the machine epiphore.
Chinese culture is still looking for something else. The New Virtualism offers a
theoretical basis on which to redefine “essence,” not only for individual materials
(e.g. nano “smart” materials) and not only for processes (e.g. digital prefabrication),
but also for countless functions muliplexically housed in one location/form because
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that location/form takes on the characteristics of natural life, perhaps even of

sentience. In terms of Chinese philosophy, it can return ti to design thinking and
process, because ti can be derived from de-virtue, on the logic of the simultaneity
of production processes as natural processes. In this sense the New Virtualism not
only derives from the digital technology that spawns it, but also bridges to ancient
Chinese ideological sources that can animate it theoretically.
Two Kinds of Bigness

“Man as the measure of all things.” This was the epigram of the human body
epiphore. In this regard da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier’s Le Modular
both place the human being at the center of theoretical contemplation, even though
the latter construct links the human form with a mechanical utopianism. Both
prescribe how and what fixed forms should look like and be. But the computer-
cyber epiphore shifts from the prescriptive to the parametric. This results not in
man as the measure of all things; it rather results in a newfound smallness for the
human being. It is one thing to be small next to the size of the Eiffel Tower, but
still revel in the fact that it is the product of human calculation. It is another thing
to be small in the ephemerally extended parametricism of a cyber mesh (see for
instance Figure 7.2). While human intellect still sets the parameters, this kind of
calculation embraces a wide range of unforeseeable outcomes. In a distributed
ontology, the Eiffel Tower is small. That is, any construction derived from the
machine epiphore only—a skyscraper, for instance—becomes small. And compared
with the mulitplexity of functions housed in one cyber-enabled center, large single-
function constructions also become small in comparison. The difference is between
a mechanical bigness and the bigness of something like organic nature itself. One
sees this contrast, again, in Ma Yasong’s World Trade Center proposal (Figures
7.1 and 7.6b); and Ma has proposed a similar vision for the Beijing CBD. The
Floating Island dwarfs any ground-level life; skyscrapers themselves are tiny. In the
New York case, Ma wanted to “question the mechanical aesthetics and vertical
cities of modernism.” He steered clear of the actual WTC replacement design which,
in his mind, is “no different than the formulaic skyscrapers that are mushrooming
up in every second-tier Chinese city.”35 In lieu of repeating this machine-based
paradigm for a new WTC, Ma’s design thinking is informed by nature itself (italics
mine):
Floating Island is a programmed landscape flowing on the WTC site, which

joins the surrounding buildings in the air in a horizontal way. The new WTC
is no longer a working machine. Instead, it becomes a construction of organism.
With rigorous analysis of the international trade model, we concluded that
successful business conducts of modern time is no longer reliant on the scale
of working space. Therefore, our strategy is to hold the business infrastructure
in a limited space, where digital technology plays the leading role in the
running of the business. This strategy is embodied in and interpreted by multi-
media center for business, digital working station, air transportation center,
international meeting rooms and convention center. Also, it provides facilities
that relate to other aspects of urban life, like theaters, digital cinemas,
recreation centers, hotels and restaurants, working gardens, parks, trees, and
even a man-made lake.36
Note Ma’s insight that cyber connectivity reduces the amount of floor space
needed to conduct business. This revolutionizes the very notion of “city,” at least
since the Industrial Revolution, which was to crowd people and resources together
at one location. Cyber connectivity takes away the need for this crowding. (In this
regard, the current enormous rural migration into Chinese cities is an Industrial,
and not necessarily a Cyber, Revolution reality.) The computer-cyber epiphore
opens up physical distances, ultimately opening space back for natural processes.
Urban congregation may not need to be for purposes of conducting business, but
rather for purposes of social interaction and outdoor activities, per Ma’s point.
Largeness of scale under the industrial epiphore was realized in the necessary size
of the city. But dig more deeply into Ma’s motivations and one senses Chinese
landscape paintings, in which humans, boats, and villages are barely discernible within
the broad natural expanses depicted. This finds expression in his Chaoyang Park
Plaza in Beijing,37 under construction as I write this, where large mountain-like
forms are arranged “according to the natural order of Shanshui (mountain-
water).”38 Indeed, an overview of much of Ma’s recent work reminds of such
paintings as Solitary Temple Amidst Bright Peaks by the early Song dynasty painter
Li Cheng (919–967 CE) (see Figures 7.6a and 7.6b). Granted, Figure 7.6b is a
decidedly all-humanly-made reality, unlike the nature shown in Figure 7.6a. But
the desire for architecture-as-nature, that is, for a “city of mountains and water”
(shan1 shui3 zi cheng2), is the driving force behind Ma’s work. In his Huangshan
project, dwellings arise out of the land in conformance to the contours, each unit
unique in plan because the contours do not mechanically repeat.39 In his recent
Harbin Opera House (see cover of this book), the structure appears as a windswept
natural formation. It is sizable, but its bigness is not so much in its physical size as
in its ontology as an extension of the nature that is already there.
An opportunity arises to compare this kind of natural bigness with Rem
Koolhaas’s theory of Bigness. It is not easy to pinpoint exactly what Koohaas means
by Bigness,40 but we can look to his own utterances for clues. In a dialogue with
Masao Miyoshi, Koolhaas commented on the “unbelievable . . . amount of tabula
rasa” going on in the razing of Asian cities to make way for new projects. He then
says, “I think it’s just a fundamental instinct to make new beginnings, and also to
assert, in a most primitive way, man’s dominion over his environment.”41 This is
bigness in one sense, and both European as well as Chinese philosophical roots
can be discerned for this kind of bigness. “Man’s dominion over his environment”
obviously rhymes with viewing nature through a Baconian-Cartesian lens (Figures
1–3b), and Koolhaas seems to view it as the default “primitive way.” It is true that
much of the gestalt of contemporary Chinese cities conforms to this utilitarian razing
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FIGURE 7.6a Solitary Temple Amidst Bright Peaks. Landscape painting by Li Cheng
(919–967 CE).
FIGURE 7.6b Ma Yansong’s WTC project viewed from ground level.

186 Future
of old infrastructure—or the razing of nature itself; think again of elevating the
Yangtze River over 70 meters to build the Three Gorges Dam, wiping out
numerous river towns in the process. All of this is within the regime of the machine
epiphore that China has so widely embraced. So Koolhaas has his point. But I
mentioned in Chapter 6 that Chinese ideas can accommodate this kind of bigness
as well. I have in mind the extreme utility of the Mohist school, expressed in
doctrines that presume simpleminded egalitarian standards for all. For instance, in
the Mozi we find laudatory examples of large alterations of landforms: draining
great plains, digging (creating) great rivers, tunneling through mountains, and so
on, all of it to “benefit the people.”42 The rationale is the Mohist doctrine of jian1
ai4, or “universal love,” in which all familial affections are deemed insufficient
because such affections must be directed to all people. Only then can wars cease
and communities prosper; only then can “benefit” come to the people. The Mohists
and the Legalists all shared a fascination with objective standards, fa3, that must be
applied blindly to all people in all circumstances. And certainly the Legalists were
not shy about razing land. The excavated tomb of the first emperor to unite China,
the Legalist Qinshi Huangdi, is multiple football fields in size; even now much of
it remains unexcavated. My point is that the Koolhaasian “tabula rasa” approach
to clearing land for new construction can be see not only as Cartesian, but also as
Mohist-Legalist. One can easily see the impact this Cartesian-Mohist-Legalist
FIGURE 7.7 Pudong housing, Shanghai, seen from the World Financial Center.
variety of bigness in any Chinese city today (Figure 7.7). Or put another way,
what we see in Figure 7.7 is Cartesian dominance over nature with perhaps Mohist-
Legalist characteristics. This type of housing-in-phalanx is a quintessential Chinese
example of how the people can “be benefitted” in today’s China.
But the bigness we see in Ma Yansong’s work, and I might also add in Pei
Zhu’s Daoist museum, is bigness of another kind. It is not the bigness of the machine,
or of social utility enabled by the machine. It is, again, the bigness of nature itself.
I am suggesting this kind of bigness traces to other lines in Chinese philosophy,
largely of Daoist stripe, but also of Confucian as well. The machine epiphore was
not conducive to expressing Daoist and Confucian outlooks in material form. Hence
the rejection of these ideas by the intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, and
the late Qing (see Chapters 4 and 5). As well, since 1949, I suggest that the current
regime’s attitude towards land development still exemplifies bigness of the
Cartesian-Mohist-Legalist-Koolhaasian type more than it does bigness of a more
organic kind, of a natural kind, of a kind that the computer-cyber epiphore can
enable. Moving forward, architecture in China will probably be a tug of war
between these two kinds of bignesses. China has proven it can make bigness of
the machine kind. Can it make bigness of the natural kind?
A Return to Feeling: The Computational Sublime

Tzonis and Lefaivre made the point that the transition from the human body to
machine epiphore left no place for “the emotional or aesthetic effects of a building”
because these subjective realities were not measurable. This stands to reason
because the totalizing impact of the mechanical epiphore resulted in the human
body itself viewed as a machine.43 Thus, since the hegemony of the machine
epiphore, the architect has been in a schizophrenic position (my term, not theirs):
he or she must produce architecture by rules alone; but he or she must also do it
with feeling—all while the machine epiphore is not amenable to accommodating
feeling.
Consider the history of the column. In the Classical Orders, columns were
extensions of human living-ness. The entasis of the columns was necessary because
we wished to sense those columns straining under the load above, as human muscles
would strain. That is, the Eye/I wanted to empathically identify with the strain.
In this regime, the floral capital of the Corinthian column was not added ornament.
The Greek mind would not have comprehended the notion of “ornament” in the
sense of something added on, something non-essential to the ontology of their
architecture. But under the machine epiphore, “ornament is crime!” intoned Adolf
Loos. At least, ornament became non-essential. More fundamentally, human eyes
began to see the floral exuberance of the Corinthian Order as ornamental. The
machine epiphore impoverished our understanding of essences. For architecture,
essence became a W10—I am referring to a structural steel post—hidden behind
a fiberglass “column cover” that mimics a Greek column. This is the outcome
188 Future
of a denizen of the Machine Age still wanting to be attached to more ancient

roots. (And, incidentally, the vernacularity of Chinese attempts to incorporate
“the Chinese order” into modernist designs did not achieve similar levels of
sophistication in sleight of hand.) At any rate, feeling and the mechanical epiphore
are not logically compatible; this was Tzonis and Lefaivre’s point.
But the computer-cyber epiphore restores aesthetic feeling, not least because,
in this epiphore, the rationale for “ornament” as a non-essential construct goes
away. As objects produced by parametrics and nanotechnology more and more
approach the appearance of natural productions, the visual attributes of those objects
are what they are because they are all essential to the organic growth process.
Currently we are, no doubt, only in a transition phase towards a New Virtualist
architecture; and one way to critically evaluate any particular New Virtualist design
is to consider just how much its visual attributes are essential outcomes of its
parametric logic, versus how much they are still non-essential “add-ons” for visual
effect. If the latter, then it is not beyond the decoration and ornament rejected by
the logic of the machine epiphore, even though its overall deposition might be
based on uninformed assumptions about what “cyber” design “looks” like. Consider
Studio Fuksas’s Shenzhen Bo’an Airport (Figure 7.8). I am not myself sufficiently
versed in computer software to evaluate this work under the measure I just
enumerated. Is this set of visual attributes determined by the essential logic of the
FIGURE 7.8 Shenzhen Bo’an Airport Terminal, by Studio Fuksas.

computer-enabled process? Better informed minds (which is to say, younger

minds) than mine can say. But my comment from a philosophical standpoint is
that, here, we see something like a form that seems to have been grown from
a generative source, or seed, as it were. What is more, among the commentaries
on this project I have come across, none deride it as “too ornamental.” My point
is that this kind of charge no longer applies to ornately complex forms arising out
of computation.
What does arise out of computation is a sense of the sublime, of a variety that
is closer to Chinese formulations of sublimity in art. On the Greco-European side,
the sublime has a long tradition in ideas, beginning with the Greek rhetorician
Longinus sometime in the first or second century CE,44 and perhaps reaching an
apogee of theoretical activity in the eighteenth century with Edmund Burke’s A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
and, later, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). This is not the place to
summarize these theories. Suffice it here to say that the European legacy of the
sublime presumes the schema of Figure 1.3b, that is, the Eye/I standing separate
from what it receives. From this vantage point, sublime feeling arises out of a
particular kind of stirring of the imagination having to do with magnitudes of scale.
In Kant, for instance, enormous demonstrations of nature’s power arouse
experiences of the dynamic sublime (consider Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off
a Harbour’s Mouth), while enormous size alone stirs experiences of the mathematical
sublime (consider the Grand Canyon).
But sublimity as understood in Chinese ideas is slightly different. It has more
to do with the wonder of how a work of art is produced, from its beginnings
within the being of the artist, and, by means of the artist’s literary pneuma (wen2
qi4), is birthed into a unified material expression. Ming Dong Gu puts it this way:
“Wenqi is the structuring energy that animates a literary work, and is therefore the
soul that gives life to a writing.”45 Furthermore, a writing without wenqi “is like
a person who knows how to see, hear, smell, and taste, but whose blood does not
fill his body from within and whose hands and feet cannot defend against
encroachment from without.”46 Gu connects qi to the operations of yin1 and yang2,
which ultimately derive from Dao4, with the productions of the soft and shadowy
yin element as beautiful, and the productions of the bright yang element as
sublime.47 The point for us is that this understanding of sublimity is rooted in the
mystery of a generative process that, beginning from invisible substrates, perhaps
at a seed level, is exhaled, as it were, into empirical forms in one single stroke.
And then there is also the provisional nature of such an understanding of art:
nothing is frozen or fixed. An organic process continues, and expressions change
in the continuous exhaling. We return to the desires for organic growth, and for
a malleable architecture that dances with us through the flux of life; to the desire
for the contours of a room capable of changing to meet the occupants subjective
needs. Jules Moloney writes of the computational sublimity of what he calls
architectural skins:
190 Future
The surveyor [Moloney means the experiencer] is confronted and intrigued

by a process manifest as evolving output; there is then a realization that neither
the beginning nor the end state is tangible, as the artwork momentarily
condenses, then reforms or dissolves in endless permutations, each subtly
different and continually drawing the attention of the surveyor. In such an
encounter the artwork is experienced as multiple moments of becoming; a
beginning or an end is incomprehensible (cue sublime encounter).48
Perhaps awkwardly worded, but we return to Wang Xizhi watching geese. He

is standing in the Orchid Pavilion, and he sees a million transformations, none
strange. Perhaps we now understand his experience as a species of sublime
encounter. It is not out of overwhelming demonstrations of natural force; nor is
it an encounter with enormous mathematical scale. This sublimity comes from
participation in a generative process that is a natural process. Moloney goes on to
say that generative art installations probably cannot fully capture the full power of
unpredictable parametric processes. Architecture is a much better modality. We
go to museums to see art briefly, in Moloney’s words, as a “one-off.” But we live
with architecture. An experience of the Shenzhen Bo’an Airport, for example, is
constant. It is not art that we go to see and then leave; it is architecture that we
live with. And even though the building surfaces are not, strictly speaking, kinetic
skins, they evoke the desire for “multiple moments of becoming.” Hence the spaces
of this airport evoke the computational sublime.
Pizzas and Sustainability: The New Virtualism and

Green Design
Currently in the global zeitgeist, there are two conflictive design movements, broadly
speaking. One is the New Virtualism, propounded above. The other movement
we can term Green Design. Indeed, “sustainability” is now a byword recognized
by architects and designers the world over (even though it is a term difficult to
precisely define). But we can look to such representative examples of this
movement, such as William McDonough’s Hanover Principles,49 or his Cradle to
Cradle;50 Ken Yeang’s books such as Green Design: From Theory to Practice;51 Norman
Foster’s zero-carbon, zero-waste city of Masdar, Abu Dhabi,52 and so on. These
two movements conflict because, while the latter stresses conservation of natural
resources, the former’s revelry in cyber-enabled forms tends not to respect the Green
agenda. The CCTV Tower, for instance, has a megastructural frame held up by
untold tons of concrete at the foundation, tons of steel in the superstructure, and
the building’s mechanical system is enormous. How to blend these two conflictive
movements into a single theoretical framework and praxis agenda? It strikes me
that this is a critical question as architectural design, and design research, moves
forward, particularly for China.
As noted, I wrote much of this chapter in Beijing. It happened to be during
one of the worst smog events in the city’s history.53 Standing at the base of the
CCTV Tower, one can barely see it. You know it is looming over you; you just
don’t know precisely where or how. So the regime of the mechanical epiphore is
not only a matter of theory; its consequences for urban pollution, health and well-
being, and public safety, not to mention political stability, can be dire. I also noted
earlier that I often muse with my students about a world in which pizzas can be
emailed. I don’t know if this world can ever be; but I am old enough to remember
when faxing a piece of paper was inconceivable. We are just at the beginnings of
the regime of the computer-cyber epiphore. If computation can morph walls t
o comfort us, perhaps someday it can email pizzas to feed us. In any event, the
New Virtualism contains the promise to radically change the “green discourse,”
which up to now is still largely responding to energy problems arising out of machine
epiphore practices: use of fossil fuels; dependence on big machinery; mass pro-
duction of physical commodities and the infrastructure to package them, transport
them, and pile up the wastage from them. Moving forward, as the computer-cyber
epiphore becomes more and more the basis for design thinking and praxis, the
smog in Beijing would most probably also be a thing of the past.
Notes
1 Adam Clark Estes, “The US Military Wants a Chip to Translate Your Brain Activity
Into Binary Code,” in Gizmodo, http://gizmodo.com/the-us-military-wants-a-chip-to-
translate-your-brain-ac-1753876325. Accessed January 21, 2016. For instance, see this
report from the MIT Media Lab: Jackie Lee Chia-Hsun et al., “Augmenting Kitchen
Appliances with a Shared Context Using Knowledge about Daily Events,” http://
web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Publications/KitchenSense.pdf. Accessed January 18, 2016.
2 Inas Hosny Ibrahim Anous, “Nanomaterials and Their Applications in Interior Design,”
American International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 7:1
( June–August, 2014), 16.
3 Parag Deulgaonkar, “Rotating Tower in Dubai: Dh2bn,” 24/7 Emirates (August 15,
2013), www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/rotating-tower-in-dubai-dh2bn-2013-
08-15-1.517668. Accessed January 7, 2016.
4 Ingeborg M. Rocker, “Versioning: Architecture as Series?,” www.gsd.harvard.
edu/images/content/5/3/538834/fac-pub-rocker-versioning-architecture-as-series.pdf.
Accessed January 3, 2016.
5 Patrik Schumacher, “Design Parameters to Parametric Design,” in Mitra Kanaani and
David Kopec, eds., The Routledge Companion for Architecture Design and Practice Established
and Emerging Trends (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.
6 Dennis Dollens, “Architecture as Nature: A Biodigital Hypothesis,” in Leonardo 42:5
(2009), 412–420.
7 Lao Tzu (Laozi), Tao-te Ching (Dao De Jing), and Wing-Tsit Chan, trans. and ed., in
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), 139.
8 Sean Ahlquist and Achim Menges, “Emerging Material Systems and the Role of
Design Computation and Digital Fabrication,” in Mitra Kanaani and David Kopec, eds.,
op. cit., 155.
9 Tom Verebes, “The Death of Masterplanning in the Age of Indeterminacy,” in Tom
Verebes, ed., Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-First
Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 106.
10 Author interview with Mary Polites, Tonji University Center for Design and Innovation,
Shanghai, October 13, 2015.
192 Future
11 Don Reisinger, “Virtual Reality Set to Take Off in 2016, Researcher Says,” www.cnet.
com/news/virtual-reality-set-to-take-off-in-2016-researcher-says/. Accessed January 6,
2016.
12 “Babel HK/SHZ” interactive installation, http://oscity.eu/projects/babel/. Accessed
January 22, 2016.
13 Email from Mark van der Net to author, January 17, 2016.
14 Corning Incorporated, “A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision
(2012),” www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0. Accessed January 5, 2016.
15 “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling
work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting
clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.” Louis
Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Aesthetically Considered” (1896). This essay is widely
available on line, e.g. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-
contemporary-architecture-fall-2009/readings/MIT4_205F09_Sullivan.pdf, 5. Accessed
March 7, 2016.
16 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ, and London:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979), 40.
17 Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988),
38–42.
18 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, “Projects, Fall 2015,” www.media.
mit.edu/files/projects.pdf. Accessed January 23, 2016.
19 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab: Marvin Minsky, Robert Speer,
Catherine Havasi, “Open Mind Common Sense,” http://media.mit.edu/research/
groups/5994/open-mind-common-sense. Accessed January 23, 2016.
20 Michael Speaks, “Intelligence After Theory,” Perspecta 38: Architecture after All (2006),
101–106.
21 David Wang, “Towards a New Virtualist Design Research Programme,” FORMakademisk
5:2 (2012), Art.2, 1–15. This publication is available at https://journals.hioa.no/index.
php/formakademisk/article/view/507/501.
22 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Mechanical Body versus the Divine Body:
The Rise of Modern Design Theory,” Journal of Architectural Education 29:1 (1975), 4–6.
23 Ibid., 4.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 “What Is the Size of the Parthenon?,” in Dimensions Info, www.dimensionsinfo.com/
what-is-the-size-of-parthenon/. Accessed November 28, 2015.
26 “All You Need to Know about the Eiffel Tower,” www.toureiffel.paris/images/PDF/
all_you_need_to_know_about_the_eiffel_tower.pdf. Accessed November 28, 2015.
27 David Wang, “The New Virtualism: Beijing, the 2008 Olympics, and a New Style of
World Architecture,” Washington State Magazine (Fall, 2008). http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/
index.php?id=144. Accessed November 29, 2015.
28 Elisa Giaccardi, “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture,” Leonardo 38:4 (2005),
342–349.
29 Ronald Knapp, “Chinese Villages as Didactic Texts,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Landscape,
Culture, and Power in Chinese Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Institute of
East Asian Studies, 2001), 110–127.
30 Verebes, ibid., 253.
31 David Wang interview with Pei Zhu, December 2, 2015, Beijing.
32 Email sent to author from Studio Pei Zhu, December 29, 2015. Also found at “Daoism
Museum,” www.studiopeizhu.com/en/content.php?id=95. Accessed January 11, 2016.
33 And so Waley renders Chapter 21: “Such the scope of the all-pervading Power/That it
alone can act through the Way.” Or again, for Chapter 51: “Dao gave them birth/The
“power” of Dao reared them.” Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (New York: The
Grove Press, 1958), 170, 205.
34 Analects 2.1, op. cit., 22.
35 Ma Yansong, Shanshui City (Zurich: Lar Müller Publishers, 2015), 35–37.

36 MAD statement about Floating Island Project emailed to author December 7, 2015.
37 See www.i-mad.com/work/chaoyang-park-plaza/?cid=4. Accessed January 23, 2016.
38 Ma Yansong, op. cit., 98.
39 “Huangshan Mountain Village by MAD,” Dezeen Magazine, www.dezeen.com/2012/
11/16/mad-unveils-plans-for-towering-village-in-the-mountains/. Accessed January 22,
2016.
40 This is borne out by the many articles in this special issue of the Journal of Architectural
Education: #SMLXL, ed. Alicia Imperiale and Enrique Ramirez, 69:2 (October, 2015).
41 Rem Koolhaas and Masao Miyoshi, “XL in Asia: A Dialogue between Rem Koolhaas
and Masao Miyoshi,” Boundary 2 24:2 (Summer, 1997), 1–19.
42 Mozi (Mo Tzu), “Universal Love,” in Wing Tsit-Chan, op. cit., 216.
43 Tzonis and Lefaivre, op. cit., 6.
44 First, the orator must bring “a capability and force which, unable to be fought, take(s)
a position high over every member of the audience.” But then, as a recipient of such a
demonstration, listeners are “both lifted up and—taking on a kind of exultant
resemblance—filled with delight and great glory, as if our soul itself had created what it
just heard.” Longinus, On the Sublime, I.4, trans. James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett
(New York and Toronto: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), 9, 42.
45 Ming Dong Gu, “From Yuanqi (Primal Energy) to Wenqi (Literary Pneuma):
A Philosophical Study of a Chinese Aesthetic,” Philosophy East & West 59:1 ( January,
2009), 37.
46 Here Ming Dong Gu is citing from Li Jian, a Song dynasty critic. Ibid., 38.
47 Ibid., 31.
48 Jules Moloney, “Kinetic Architectural Skins and the Computational Sublime,” Leonardo
42:1 (2009), 65–70 (66).
49 William McDonough, “The Hanover Principles,” in Mallgrave and Contandriopoulos,
eds., op. cit., 584–585.
50 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle (New York: North Point
Press, 2002).
51 Ken Yeang, Green Design: From Theory to Practice (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011).
52 Masdar, The Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company press release: “WWF and Abu Dhabi’s
Masdar Initiative Unveil Plan for World’s First Carbon-neutral, Waste-free, Car-free City”
(2008) in Mallgrave and Contandriopoulos, op. cit., 601–603.
53 Zhuang Pinghui, “Beijing’s Smog Off the Scale But Still No Sign of Top Red Alert,”
in South China Morning Post, December 1, 2015, www.scmp.com/news/china/society/
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APPENDIX
cai2, ~ (class of timber construction; eight such classes in the Song Dyna sty manual Yinzhao Fashi)
danl wei4, ~ ti'L (a people's work unit in the People's Republic of China)
dao4, it (way, path)
Da04 De2 Jingl, il • ~ (the primary Daoist scripture)
de2, . (virtue)
ding3, III (ancient vessel)
dou3 gong3, 4 m(wood bracketing system in im perial architecture)

e4, jffi (evil)
/en4, ~ (see cai2: each cai divided into 15/en)
/englliu2, )Xl ilIf (a Neo-Daoist term used to describe one whose actions are naturally spontaneous)
/engl shui3, )Xl * ("wind / water" : the practice of geomantic placement of objects in the environment)
gongl an4, ~ • (in Chan Buddhism, an action or a saying that jars one out of conventional thinking)
gua4, tJ (to pass through)

gua2 jial, L1I • (nation)
hui4, * (to assemble; an assembly; the simplified script of this word is ~)
jial, . (family)
jianl ai4, *' ~ (universal love, akey term in Mohist philosophy)
jing3 tian2 zhi4 du4, ~ III tlJ It (the well-field system, first noted in Mencius)
Kao3 Gongl Ji4, ~ I iG (Record of Trade; dates from the Zhou period)
kao3 zheng4, ~ liE (evidential learning; a system of ph ilological study in the early Qing)
1i3, lL (ritual, propriety, protocol)
1i3, JI (principle)
la03 jial, :t;. (one's hometown, one's roots)
mei3,. (usually translated "beauty," "beautiful")

196 Appendix
men2, fl (door, gate)

nei4, !1q (in side, interior)
qi4, ac (early Chinese cosmology held that all th ings were comprised of qi)
ren2, C (benevolence, proba bly the key Confucian term)
ren2 jia l , A • (others, in the sense of not-us)
si4 he2 yuan4, I!!I €I" II!ii; (traditional Chinese courtyard residence)
Shen2 Nong2, ~ ~ (Divine Farmers; early Chi nese philosophical school)
shi2 do4 jion4 zhu4, + j:;, It 9A (Ten Great Buildings, erected in 1959 in Beijing)
shi4, ± (member of the Confucian literary class)

tai4 ji2,:t: ~& (The Great Ultimate)
ti3 yang4, '* m (substance versus use; or essence versus fu nction)
tianl, ~ (Heaven)
tianl ming4, ~ $ (Mandate of Heaven)
tianl xia4, ~ "'F (a term to designate all things " un der heaven" )
ting2 zi, • To (open air pavilion)

wai4, ~ (external, outside)
wen2,){ (culture, literature; see Chapters 3 and 6)
wen2 ren2, ){ A (a cultured person)
wo3jial, JI; • (my, our house)
wu3 xing2, li fT (Five Elements, or Five Goings)
wu2 wei2, ;;C ;Ig (Non-action; I transla te th is " e

l tting nature flow through you")
xiI yang2 fou2, ~ ;$ MI! (Western Pavilions)
yao2 dong4, &lfaI (cave dwellings du g into mountainsides; common in northern Shaanxi Province)
Yi4Jingl , ~ ~ (Booko!Changes)
yinl yang2, IIJj 118 (weak and strong forces pervasive in the cosm os)
Ying2 Zao4 Fa3 Shi4, • li: l:t; jJ: (Song Dynasty construction manual)
yuan2, IiiiI (ga rden; the reference to this te rm in Chapter 6 is the traditiona l script: Ill)
Appendix 197
zheng4 ming2,:iE ::g (rectification of names; a Confucian doctrine)
zhongl guo2, It:J III (China)
zi4 qiang2, 13 0 (se lf-strengthening)
zi4 ran2, 13 ~ (nature, spontaneity)
The statement by Xi Jinping referenced in Chapter 6:"!l ~ mIll ... ~ m7l<. iC ~ it #:-~ "
Wang4 de2 jian4 shanl, kan4 de2 jian4 shui3, ji4 de2 zhu4 xiangl chau2: "Gazing towards the
mountains; looking at the waters; you experience nostalgia."
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CREDITS
Cover: Harbin Opera House, permission granted by MAD Architects, Beijing. Photograph
by Hufton & Crow.Figure 1.1: Art Resource, MoMA
Poem cited in Chapter 1: Wang Hsi-chih, “Orchid Pavilion,” in Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed.,
revised, Wai-lim Yip, Editor/Translator, p. 135. Copyright, 1997, Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, www.dukeupress.edu
Figure 1.2: Wiki Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DURER2.png
Figure 1.4: Qiongyan Gao
Figure 3.2: URBANUS (Shenzhen and Beijing)
Figure 4.1: Professor Delin Lai
Figure 4.2: Gelareh Sadeghi
Figure 5.2: Artists’ Rights, Art Resource
Figure 5.3a: Wiki commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Table_of_archit
ecture,_Cyclopaedia,_1728,_volume_1.jpg
Figure 5.3b: Carrie Vielle
Figure 5.5: Yu Zeyang
Figure 5.7: Professor Delin Lai
Figure 6.3b: Ghassan Hassan
Figures 6.4a, 6.4b: Professor Li Baofeng
Figure 6.6: Vector Architects (Dong Gong), Beijing
Figure 7.1: MAD (Ma Yansong), Beijing
Figure 7.2: Mark Van der Net, OSCity.net
Figure 7.3a: Andres Sevtsuk, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Director, City Form
Lab, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
Credits 209
Figure 7.4: Liantang/Heung Yuen Wai Boundary Control Point Terminal Building,
Shenzhen, China (2011) International Design Competition. Organisers: Civil Enginnering
Development Department; Bureau of Public Works Shenzhen Municipality, Civil
Engineering and Development Department, HKSARG, Architectural Services Department,
HKSARG, The Hong Kong Institute of Architects. Joint Venture: dotA (Beijing), HKPDA
(Hong Kong), OCEAN CN (Hong Kong): dotA: Gao Yan, Duo Ning, Chang Qiang, Wang
Xin, Crystal Yiu. HKPDA: Sam Cho, Yang Wang, Ben Dai, Jaenes Bong. OCEAN CN:
Tom Verebes, Eric Liu
Figure 7.5: Studio Pei-Zhu, Beijing
Figure 7.6a: Wiki Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Li_Cheng_-_
A_Solitary_Temple_Amid_Clearing_Peaks_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Figure 7.6b: MAD (Ma Yansong), Beijing
INDEX
aesthetics: of accrual 74–77; of clutter 7, 145; organicism of 143; qi 142, 158,

64, 66–69; defined 64–65; 178; town plans 142, 178
environmental 76–80; Eye/I 64–66; of CCTV (Beijing) 119, 162–165, 171, 173,
grime 75; of the ordinary 80; of pattern 190–191
69–74; of proportion 70; of shapes 78; Chiang Kai-shek 119, 126
of surprise 79; of time 74–77 China Academy of Art (Hangzhou)
apperception 8, 85, 88, 94–97, 99, 102, 146–147, 178
105, 178 China Art Museum (Shanghai) 100
architect: Chinese case 2–3, 16, 86, 154; Chineseness 92, 111, 119, 122, 163
architect-as-cultivator 153–158; Chinese architectural unit (CAU) 26, 55,
Western case 38, 49, 87, 187 58
Aristotle 4, 47, 70, 150 city planning 26, 72, 105–106, 126, 130,
147, 171; see also urban planning
Bao Pao (MAD Architects, Beijing) 21 clutter (aesthetic quality of) 7, 61–69, 71,
beauty: Western conceptions of 42–46, 79–80
64–65, 70; Chinese/Japanese Cody, Jeffrey 99, 119, 125
conceptions of 26, 49, 76, 79 Confucius, Confucianism: Analects 16, 55,
Beaux-Arts 2, 22, 86–87, 98, 119, 126 65, 69, 163; as expressed in Forbidden
Beijing 2, 61, 72–73, 86, 88–89, 93, 96, City plan 55; architectural style 38,
101–107, 119, 127, 130, 143, 147, 48–58; Confucian revival 5; Great
156–157, 159–162, 164, 171, 173, Learning 29; li3-ritual 26, 50–51, 55, 57,
177–178, 180, 182–183, 190–191 67, 151–154; li3-principle 51–52, 55,
Beijing Railway Station 103–104 57, 71, 73, 149–150, 154; moral
bigness 182–187 causality 50, 55, 57, 78, 181; neo-
Bird’s Nest (Beijing) 175–177 Confucianism 51, 55, 171; rectification
Buddhism 17–18, 24, 29, 67–68, 79, 88, of names 23, 32, 50, 51; ren2-
90, 163 benevolence 5, 26, 30, 57, 66, 149, 151,
159, 164
cai 52, 57 correlative view 2, 4–5, 7–8; architectural
calligraphy: art, aesthetics 14, 143; Bird’s style 50–58; as-is condition 162;
Nest 177; calligraphic lilt 142–147, calligraphy 142–147; city planning 104;
177–180; cultural cultivation 142–143; clutter 66, 70; defined 16; fixity 23–29;
design thinking 145, 177–178; nature fluidity 18–23; horizontality 33; jia 29,
Index 211
50; loss of 85, 94–98, 112, 114, 124, Husserl, Edmund 7, 97

131; New Virtualism 182; pattern 71; Hussey, Harry 95, 99, 119
porosity 29–32; rimless world 169, 177; hutong 72–73, 105–106, 147, 159
siheyuan 103; symbol 101; time 75–76
Cret, Paul Philippe 2, 86 I Jing 6, 18, 29
critical theory 3, 8, 17–18, 97, 113, 116, Industrial Revolution 2, 8, 64, 85, 88–89,
132–134, 150 96, 102, 111, 117, 168, 171–173, 183
Dao, Daoism: Daodejing 4, 23, 65, 67, 97, Japan 80, 93, 101, 125
164, 181; wu wei 16, 67, 97, 178; zi ran Jianfei Zhu 3, 8, 89, 103, 113, 134, 142
24, 67, 97 Ju’er Hutong 72–73, 105–106
de (virtue) 55–57, 180–182
Deng Xiaoping 123, 130, 159 Kales, F.H. 117, 120
Descartes, Cartesian(ism) 7, 14, 66, 90, Kant, Immanuel 94, 111, 132, 143, 189
97–98, 101, 147, 150, 163, 169, 175, Kaogongji 71
183, 186–187 Koolhaas, Rem (OMA) 164–165, 183, 186
Delin Lai 86
Dewey, John 93, 116 Laozi 4, 9, 32, 76, 143, 163, 170
Dong Gong (Vector Architects, Beijing) Le Corbusier 40, 48, 102, 105, 117–119,
158 182
dou gong 5, 52, 58, 86, 99, 117–120 Li Baofeng 154–156
Liang Qichao 125
evidential learning 90–91 Liang Sicheng: A Pictorial History of Chinese
Eye/I: defined 16-18; diagrams 15, 92; Architecture 55, 127; architectural
Chinese case 16–17, 48, 50, 55, 68-69, grammar 114; “father” of modern
77, 88, 95–96; Greco-European case Chinese architecture 2, 22, 86; historic
16–17, 55, 65, 75, 87, 90, 101, 162, preservation 22; national Chinese
187, 189 architectural style 2, 86, 94; National
Central Museum 87; under
façade-ism, façade awareness 44, 86–87, Communism 128; University of
96, 98–99, 101, 117, 181 Pennsylvania 2, 23, 86; Western
Fairbank, Wilma 87 influence upon 2, 86, 88, 126
fen 50–53, 55, 57 Lin Huiyin 87
feng shui 5–6, 19–21, 78 Linked Hybrid (Beijing) 160–161
Frampton, Kenneth 141, 156 Liu Jiaping 156
Forbidden City 26, 51–58, 89, 91, Liu Xiaohu 143
100–101 Liu Xie 147
Fung Yu-lan 15 Lu Xun 110–111, 114, 117
Lu Yanzhi 99, 119
gardens (Chinese) 24–27, 71, 73, 77, 79,
143–145 Ma Yansong (MAD Architects, Beijing)
Graham, A.C. 2, 9, 16, 22, 151 16, 21, 170, 182–183, 185
Great Hall of the People (Beijing) Mao Zedong 3, 50, 101, 116, 119,
101–102, 121, 145 125–126, 128, 156
Global Center (Chengdu) 104–106 May Fourth Movement 8, 93, 125-126
Mencius 20, 30, 78, 90, 150–152, 159
Hall of Supreme Harmony 55–57 Mengyuan Xu 161-162
Han Feizi 150, 163–164 modernity in China 2, 18, 92–94, 101–104
Hankou 91, 112–113, 121, 130–131 Mozi, Mohism 163, 186–187
Hegel, G.W.F. 48, 91, 93, 116 Munro, Donald 24, 30, 51
Heidegger, Marin 7, 65, 97 Murphy, Henry K. 99, 119, 125
Holl, Steven 160–161
Hong Kong 61, 91, 171–172, 178–179 National Central Museum (Nanjing)
Humble Administrator’s Garden (Suzhou) 86–87
77 New Culture Movement 8, 110, 125–126
212 Index
New Virtualism: 8; bigness 182–187; Sun Yat-sen 99, 119, 126–127

calligraphic lilt 177–180; computational Sun Zhuo 156–157
sublime 187–190; computer-cyber
epiphore 174–177; defined 174; Taiwan 61–62, 126
distributed ontology 171–173; material Tanizaki, Jun-ichiro 74–76
fluidity 168–169; multiplexity 173–174; Ten Great Buildings 101–104, 130
organic generation 169–171; tian, tian ming 33, 50, 52
sustainability 190–191; virtue (de) ti yung 17, 93, 102–104, 154, 181
180–182 treaty ports 2, 91–92, 119, 125
Ningbo Museum (Ningbo) 145–146, 178 Tom Verebes 171, 178
Opium War(s) 2, 18, 88, 91, 107, 114 urban planning see city planning
Orange County Beijing 106 Urbanus Architects 2, 31, 61–63
pattern (aesthetics of) 7, 13, 19, 66, 69–74, vernacularity 21, 153–154, 156, 158, 181,
78–79 188
Peace Hotel (Sassoon Building, Shanghai) Villa Savoye 117–118
94–95, 130 villages in cities (VIC) 61–63
Pei Zhu 178, 180 Vitruvius 1, 43, 49, 98, 150, 175
Peking Union Medical College 94, 99, 119
phenomenology 7, 14, 17, 65, 97 Waley, Arthur 181
Plato 4, 7, 37–48, 65, 70–71 Wang Shu 145–146, 177
positivism, positivist 8, 17, 85, 88, 93, Wang Xizhi 13–15, 22, 96, 169, 177, 190
96–98, 106, 112, 150, 174 Wang Yangming 90
poststructuralism 8, 113, 123–133 wen (pattern, culture, literature) 69–71, 78,
proportion (aesthetics of) 7, 42, 65–66, 80, 147
70–71, 130, 162 Western-style pavilions (Beijing) 89–91,
119, 127
qi: composition of 19, 78; design thinking Wu Liangyong 30, 72, 159
158, 177, 178–180, environmental Wuhan 24, 64, 91, 112–113, 117,
aesthetics 77–80; feng shui 19–20, 78; fill 120–122, 130–131, 143, 146, 154, 161
heaven and earth (Mencius) 20, 78–80; wu wei see Daoism
I Jing 19; literary 80, 142, 158; sublime wu xing 21–22, 66, 142
189
Xi’an 33, 88, 147–148, 156
ren 57, 151, 159, 164 Xunzi 52, 150–152, 164
Shanghai 2–3, 24, 91, 94–95, 99–100, Yan Meng (Urbanus) 2

125–126, 130, 143, 156, 171, 186 Yang Tingbao 94, 104
Shenzhen 2, 31, 61, 63, 172, 178–179, yaodong 156, 161
188, 190 Yingzhao fashi 49–52
space: Chinese ideology of 15–16, 20, 24, yin yang 19, 21, 66, 79, 100, 142, 189
27, 29, 63, 68–69, 76, 106, 145, Yung Ho Chang 3, 147
157–158, 180; courtyard 28–29, 32–33,
55, 77, 103, 157–158; cyber (impact of) Zhao Chen 86, 98
177–178, 182; modernity (impact of) zheng ming (rectification of names) 23, 32,
93, 104–106, 145, 160; time 66, 76; 50
Western ideology of 41, 46, 87–89, 117 Zhu Xi 29, 48–49, 51, 69, 71, 90, 149
Spence, Jonathan 50, 87 zi qiang (self-strengthening) 17, 91–93
Steinhardt, Nancy 38 zi ran (spontaneity) 23–25, 55, 67–68, 97,
structuralism 8, 63, 111, 115–117, 123 176
sublime 81, 189–190 Zuangzi 24, 29, 48, 76–77

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A PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE

A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future examines the impact of

David Wang is Professor of Architecture in the School of Design and Construction,

ISBN: 978-1-138-88460-1 (hbk)

Acquisition Editor: Wendy Fuller

1 Architecture and Experience in the Chinese Correlative

2 Homes for Plato and Confucius 37

3 An Aesthetics of Chinese Built Environments 61

4 The Positivist Turn: The Loss of Apperception in Present-day

5 Chinese Architecture in an Age of Poststructuralism 110

6 A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture 141

7 Towards an Architecture of the New Virtualism 168

Appendix: Chinese Technical Terms 195

I.1 “Consulate-style” housing under construction, Ningbo 6

3.2 Design proposal for Gangxia Village, Shenzhen, by Urbanus

6.4b Dinosaur Egg Museum wall detail 155

I am grateful to Washington State University for granting me the professional leave

The sheer volume and speed of building construction in China today is

the idea of the critical by bringing in a “relational” perspective, so that the

including agents of power, capital and natural resource, in an ethical and

organicism of things. Instead it resides only in a “temporary lodging house.” The

in the case of a child who seems to be suffering from minor ailments, or is

FIGURE I.1 “Consulate-style” housing under construction, Ningbo.

location in my dwelling unit in a building designed in no particular way (see Figure

embrace of positivist science resulted in the loss of phenomenological immediacy

Looking up: blue sky’s end.

Calligraphy, art, watching geese, deep solitude. Immense transformations. In

FIGURE 1.2 Nude and Artist (1525), by Albrecht Dürer.

FIGURES 1.3a AND b Two heuristic Eye/I diagrams.

The Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber (author of the essay “I-Thou”)

The objectivized world of modern science dissolves this primitive synthesis

Therefore in the system of Yi there is the grand terminus, which produced

So not only does qi correlate to physical placement of buildings, qi and placement

FIGURE 1.4 A feng shui bar in a residence, Hangzhou.

Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about governing. Confucius responded,

A tall hall of several bays is called ‘All-Regarding’ because ﬂowers of every

I suggest another factor driving the ﬁxed–ﬂuid dynamic in historic Chinese

By Giles (1898): I steer my boat to anchor by the mist-clad river eyot.

it does not translate into a uniform continuum of aesthetic quality in physical

Porosity and the Social Role of the Wall

… and all the world will be at peace

To extend your knowledge, investigate things

40 Mary Bockover, “The Concept of Emotion Revisited: A Critical Synthesis of Western

Steinhardt is addressing the dilemma early twentieth-century Chinese architects

I cite Bourdieu to underline that architectural manifestations of a culture’s overall

Architecture through Plato’s Cave

Coupling a political ideal with the visual attributes of buildings is a recurring

Madness serves as a constant point of reference throughout the Urban Parc

FIGURE 2.1 A “folie” at the Parc de la Villette, Paris, by Bernard Tschumi.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I explain how the loss of ideality in contemporary works

Thus the Greco-European tradition trains architects by giving them an instinct

bodies of knowledge. Architects are thus not unlike the philosopher-guardians of

And here is Vitruvius:

FIGURE 2.2a Interior of St. Denis Cathedral, Paris.

Architecture followed suit: ovoid domes emerged as the stasis of Renaissance

At every stage, change in ideals motivated change in the physical attributes of

Confucius and the Solar System

Generally speaking, if one can achieve learning so naturally as to be beyond

centuries of construction practices embedded in the Chinese artisan guild system.

Again, the fen-portion-role conception allows for an otherwise constantly

imbued with relational responsibility to maintain a cosmic orderliness, departure

FIGURE 2.4 Dou gong brackets in the Forbidden City, Beijing.

We can characterize Chinese semantic theories as a view that the world is

In the Chinese correlative view, the mind is not an “internal picturing