This thesis examines China’s early modern architectural pedagogy before the 1952 restructuring of higher education under the Communist regime. In this context, it reflects on two key figures—Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) and Huang Zuoshen (1915–1975)—in their respective departments of architectural engineering at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and St. John’s University (SJU, Shanghai). I explore three themes—architect-teacher, makeshift modernity, and contested discourse—which encapsulate Huang’s and Liang’s teaching methodology and reflect their foreign-study experiences.
Part 1 is dedicated to Huang: his studies at the Architectural Association (1933–1938) in Britain during its curricular revolution inspired by the Modern Architectural Research Group; his learning at the Graduate School of Design (1939–1941), not only from Gropius (the focus of previous scholarship) but also other modernists; and the SJU architecture programme Huang established in 1942, where he gathered an international faculty and promoted progressive approaches beyond Bauhaus principles.
Part 2 features Liang’s environmental design pedagogy at Tsinghua: his concept of building (ying jian, culminating in his proposal for a College of Building); his methods of teaching city planning (which he added to his curriculum after the Second World War); and his influences from midwestern US institutions (i.e., the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the University of Michigan, and Taliesin) and Harvard’s Fogg Museum of Art.
Finally, the thesis investigates Huang’s and Liang’s beliefs about the social position of the architect. It aligns Liang’s views on architecture’s relationship to society, engineering, and art with Huang’s commitment to architecture’s popular, scientific, and national aspects in post-1949 China. This thesis demonstrates that, despite the differences between inward-looking Beijing and outward-looking Shanghai, and between Liang’s and Huang’s respective backgrounds in the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus modernism, these two figures embody the pedagogic plurality that characterised the establishment of architectural education in the first half of twentieth-century China
