ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the impact of the technological imposition on Chinese architecture in the modern age. David van Zanten gives a three-part definition for Beaux-Arts approach: (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. The Industrial Revolution that began in England in the mid-eighteenth century played a significant role in ushering China into the modern age. 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. In the Greco-European tradition, a building's façade has been the subject of theoretical contemplation since Vitruvius.
