ABSTRACT
Architecture's novelty in the Chinese context and its affiliation with industry meant that it was considered the most practical and prosperous of the arts. The association with the applied rather than the artistic within this allegorical Chinese landscape acknowledges architecture's craft origins, questions architecture's artistic credentials and challenges its creative spirit, so much so that Feng Zikai claimed that many visitors to the garden avoided this section altogether. In setting out to explore the landscape of architectural modernity in China in the first half of the twentieth century, the study acknowledges that the framing of modernity and architecture within the context of China poses a problem when both are western imports. In architecture, even where Chinese characteristics such as rational and modular modes of construction and systemic standardisation mirrored those of modernism, as they did in Japan, China's building traditions were overlooked by architectural modernists in the west.
