ABSTRACT
The process of arrival of western modernism contains trajectories of how modern architecture appeared and evolved in China. This chapter traces the explorations of Tongji academics, especially Huang Zuoshen and Feng Jizhong, in the 1940s–60s, for pioneering contributions. Tracing their thoughts, educational ideas, design methods, and practices – going beyond “styles,” it reveals rich external impacts and the pioneers’ contributions to modern architecture as a discipline in a historical perspective. It reveals how the pioneers, facing Beaux-Arts systems of dominance in China, strived for a reconstruction with east–west collisions, and how they encountered setbacks in an ideological framing of these decades.
