The Story of Liang and Lin

Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin came to Penn at the height of Philadelphia’s Beaux-Arts building boom. They returned to revolutionary with ideas that made a lasting mark on the development of architecture in the People’s Republic.

By Naomi Elegant

1947, when he was a visiting fellow Liang’s busy schedule. “You can see what at Yale University and China’s rep- a hot shot you have gotten to be,” Ben- In resentative on the international diner teased his old classmate in a letter. team designing the United Na- Liang politely declined the speaking invi- tions Headquarters in New York, Liang tation, explaining in a handwritten reply Sicheng Ar’27 GAr’27 took a short trip to that “it would be best for me to join my old Philadelphia to visit his alma mater. friends, have lots of fun, and no talk.” He stayed at the Camac Street resi- Liang stayed overnight and left Phila- dence of Alfred Bendiner Ar’22 GAr’27, delphia the next evening, after spending an architecture classmate from Penn the day “in the Museum,” likely the Penn whose wife Elizabeth was close friends Museum. Bendiner had been trying to get with Liang’s wife and longtime collabo- the University to award Liang an honor- rator, Lin Huiyin FA’27. ary degree, but missed the deadline and Bendiner asked Liang if he wanted to had been advised to re-apply the follow- give a talk at the Architects Alumni As- ing year, provided Liang was still in the sociation dinner they were attending, United States. By that time, though, he which had been arranged to accommodate had returned to China for good.

48 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Nov | Dec 2019 Photos: (this page) Library of Congress; (facing page) Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection Nov | Dec 2019Lin and THE Liang PENNSYLVANIA at the Temple GAZETTE of Heaven. 49 Below: Rodin Museum (Philadelphia) and Hall of Supreme Harmony () share design characteristics.

Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin were eration was serendipitous. There is a Liang’s Beaux-Arts education lent itself part of a group of Chinese students who certain visual compatibility between the to his preservation eff orts back in China, came to the US on Boxer Indemnity Beaux-Arts style and traditional Chinese off ering “a gentler way to modernize.” scholarships in the 1920s and then re- architecture, Steinhardt explains. In both It was not just the sublime that he turned to China, becoming known as the disciplines, “There’s a grand formalism, picked up through his architectural edu- First Generation in . there’s symmetry, there’s the use of gates, cation at Penn, but the mundane, too. He “Every architect in China traces his or and there’s also a link with antiquity.” took classes in heating and plumbing, her lineage from this group,” says Nancy Just place a photograph of the Forbid- which traditional Chinese buildings—like Steinhardt, professor of East Asian art den City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony in those in the , constructed and curator of Chinese art at the Penn Beijing next to a photograph of a Beaux- from impermanent materials like wood— Museum. “They took the Penn educa- Arts building, Steinhardt suggests, and had never incorporated. tion, they went back to China, and they in both “there is this grandeur, symme- “Liang’s personal mission was for China wanted to make a diff erence in the fu- try, clear central axis, and emphasis on to be able to modernize without losing Old ture of their nation.” the sides and the top.” China,” Steinhardt says. “So what he was When Liang and Lin arrived at Penn in trying to do is use modern materials, but September 1924, Philadelphia was the always make China look like China. He third-largest city in the country. It was a really worked hard not to lose the past.” vital sea port and industrial powerhouse. Penn showed Philadelphia is dotted with Paul Cret’s Architecturally, it was emerging from the infl uence [“Arts,” Sep|Oct 2018]. In ad- City Beautiful Movement and into the Liang and Lin dition to the Rodin Museum, he drafted golden age of the pre-Crash 1920s. the fi rst plans for the Benjamin Franklin Everywhere, buildings were cropping Parkway, based on the Champs-Ély- up that refl ected the city’s vibrancy and “a gentler way sées in Paris, and he designed the origi- growth: in 1927, the Parkway Central nal Barnes Foundation building in Mer- Library opened its doors; in 1928, the to modernize.” ion, all in the Beaux-Arts style. Stein- Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in 1929, the Rodin Museum, designed by the French Beaux-Arts master , who taught and infl u- enced Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and other members of the First Generation, as well as Louis Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71, who graduated from Penn the year Liang and Lin matriculated. Cret came to Penn in 1903, recruited by Fine Arts dean Warren Powers Laird to lead the architectural program, and stayed on the faculty until he retired in 1937. By the 1920s, when Liang, Lin, and many other Boxer scholars were on cam- pus, the program had fl owered into one of the best in the country, specializing in the Beaux-Arts style Cret had imported from Paris. In 1926 the School of Fine Arts announced that Penn students had won more architecture competitions in the previous four years than students from all other schools combined; half of the winners were Chinese students. The overlap between Cret and the stu- dents who became part of the First Gen-

50 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Nov | Dec 2019 Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection hardt says that there is no evidence that later wrote, “Miss Lin has pursued her leges thanks to a wealthy family and sup- Liang and the other First Generation course of study with great earnestness portive father, explains Siyen Fei, associ- architects came to Penn specifi cally to and a high degree of success. The amount ate professor of Chinese history at Penn. study under Cret. “It’s kind of just really of study which she has taken each year “Not everybody enjoyed that level of good fortune that this was the person has been greater than that of the average freedom. Social class was a big factor.” Liang worked with.” student … In point of character, breeding, Still, Lin’s lifetime of accomplishments Though Liang and Lin both came to mentality and natural talent Miss Lin has was exceptional. “She really became, I Penn to study architecture, only Liang shown the highest qualities.” think, a role model in China for women,” graduated with degrees in it (earning Classmates recall Lin Huiyin, who went Fei says. “She was very active, she’s beau- both a master’s and a bachelor’s in archi- by Phyllis in English-speaking circles, as tiful, talented, and she still asserted that tecture in three years). The architecture vivacious and social. Her friend and fel- kind of independence—she had a career program did not admit women—it only low student Elizabeth Sutro FA’27, who [and] a husband who really respected changed that policy in the mid-1930s—so later married Bendiner, told Penn archi- what she did.” Lin graduated with a bachelor of fi ne arts vist Francis Dallett in 1979 that Lin was As widespread as Lin’s infl uence may degree. At the time, only 10 percent of “an exquisite, lovely girl” with a “wonder- have been, her legacy is most tangible on students in the School of Fine Arts— ful sense of humor.” The author of a 1925 a much smaller scale—within her family. which encompassed the architecture, article in the The Philadelphia Public Her niece is the American architect Maya music, and fi ne arts programs—were Ledger seemed as spellbound by Lin as Lin, whose illustrious career was kick- women, and the majority studied music. everyone else who met her, writing of her started in 1981 when, at 21 and still an According to Wilma Fairbank, Lin’s “soft laughter” and “sharp, black eyes undergraduate at Yale, she won a nation- close friend and author of a seminal bi- twinkling with amusement.” wide competition to design the Vietnam ography of the couple, women couldn’t In Chinese popular culture today, the Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. enter the program because “architec- couple has been elevated to near-myth- “My whole life was framed by my fa- tural students had to work on their ical romantic status. They have been the ther’s respect for Lin Huiyin,” Maya Lin drafting at all hours of the night, and the subject of multi–part documentaries, said to Smithsonian magazine in 2017. unchaperoned presence of women television soap operas, and even an ac- “You could say that Lin’s passion for art would be improper.” tual opera—the China National Opera and architecture fl ows through me[.] Lin had not acquiesced without a fi ght: and Drama Theatre’s Lin Huiyin, which Now I’m doing what she wanted to do.” when she was still in Beijing, she and her premiered in May 2017 in Beijing. father wrote letters to Laird, asking if she Lin’s personal life especially has been could circumvent the policy, even enlist- the subject of public sensation. Before iang and Lin, not yet married, lived ing the Chinese Legation Minister— heading to Penn and marrying Liang, separately while at Penn. When he equivalent to the national ambassador— she became acquainted with the Chinese Lfi rst arrived, Liang lived on 40th to speak to the dean on her behalf. Laird poet Xu Zhimo while studying in Eng- Street, in a Victorian a few houses was unrelenting, advising Lin to apply land. Xu fell in love with the young Lin down from what is now Copabanana, to other schools or to consider working and divorced his fi rst wife, Zhang Youyi, where today’s Penn students congregate toward a fi ne arts degree and supple- whose great niece went on to write a for happy hour margaritas. Lin boarded menting it with architecture electives. book about Zhang’s life and that tumul- in a Spruce Street dwelling that now Lin opted to enroll at Penn despite those tuous love triangle. houses the independent bookstore limitations, but her academic record In addition to architecture, Lin was House Of Our Own. shows that architecture was always front also a published writer of poems and Liang later moved to Pine Street, and and center. She worked in Cret’s offi ce, prose. She traveled Europe with her fa- then into a building on 38th Street took graduate-level design courses and ther, the politician and diplomat Lin which no longer exists; Lin moved to some courses that ordinarily excluded Changmin. When Nobel laureate Rabi- another boarding house, on Woodland women (carpentry, plumbing, and drain- ndranath Tagore visited China, it was Avenue, a block east of what became her age), and from 1926 to 1927 even served Lin’s family who hosted the giant of Ben- favorite place in Philadelphia. as a part-time architecture instructor. gali literature, and Lin and Xu who in- “Woodland Cemetery is the spot I like With the help of a summer session, she terpreted for him. best in this whole city of Philadelphia,” Lin still managed to graduate a year early. Lin’s ability to travel and her access to told The Philadelphia Public Ledger. “It’s Laird, who had been so resistant to ad- education was an anomaly for women only the hustle, bustle and noise that mitting Lin to the architecture program, at that time. She enjoyed these privi- never ends that makes me so tired. I like

Nov | Dec 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 51 Below: Monument to the People’s Heroes; Liang’s drawing of an old Chinese structure. quiet, I like to get alone sometimes … If I go to Fairmount Park, yes, I see trees and grass, but the crowds are always there. I guess I must sit among the tombs.” Her attraction to that bucolic burial ground, with its winding paths and im- mense trees, would later fi nd an echo in her niece’s experience of New Haven. Maya Lin, in a 1982 Washington Post ar- ticle, described visits to the cemetery near Yale’s campus as one of her favorite ac- tivities as an undergraduate architecture student there. “The Grove Street Ceme- tery is beautiful,” she said at the time. “There’s something peaceful about it. You feel removed. You feel you’re in their world. You’re in the world of the dead.” Though she stole away to the cemetery for peace and solitude, Lin Huiyin was remarkably active in collegiate extracur- ricular life. She was a member of the Chi- nese Student Association, the May Day Lighting Committee, and the Social Com- mittee of the Philadelphia Chinese Stu- dents’ Club. In 1926 she won a Christmas card design competition, and in 1927 she invited prominent Chinese intellectual to speak in Philadelphia. For Liang, Lin, and the other First Generation architects, Penn was always a stepping stone to a greater, lifelong commitment. “They were the kind of people who did not plan to stay in the West at all. They really identifi ed with China and they were here to learn things to bring back to China,” Fei says. When they returned to China, the First Gen- eration set up the fi rst architecture schools and design fi rms in the country. Nineteen-year-old Lin, speaking to the Ledger correspondent, explained how she intended to use her Western educa- tion: “We must learn the fundamental principles of all art only in order to apply them to designs distinctly ours. We want to study methods of construction that mean permanency.” Liang and Lin married in 1928 and spent the rest of their shared life col- laborating on articles, teaching, travel- ing, and designing buildings together.

Fisher52 THE Fine PENNSYLVANIA Arts Library Image GAZETTE Collection Nov | Dec 2019 They spent much of the 1930s traversing It’s hard, in retrospect, not to look at 1949, when many of the same background China’s vast and remote countryside, their story and see a tragedy, a narrative of chose to leave, Fei says, “They decided to seeking and surveying centuries-old lost potential. In 1949, Liang drafted an stay because of their sense of mission to wooden temples tucked into mountain- urban development plan for Beijing, out- change things in China and to do some- side terraces, often braving mud, lice, lining a proposal to preserve and com- thing for Chinese people. So they also be- and bandits to do so. memorate its magnifi cent castellated city long to these very progressive, left-wing, Their measurements, sketches, and walls, ancient gates, watchtowers and young scholars in China. There’s still a lot photographs are in some cases the only hutong—the architecture that had prompt- to be said about that kind of idealism.” such recordings of the beautiful and di- ed American city planner Edmund Bacon Every spring, Fei teaches a survey lapidated structures they found, many of (sometimes referred to as “The Father of course on modern China for Penn un- which were destroyed by Japanese bomb- Modern Philadelphia”) to dub Beijing, in dergraduates, the majority of whom ings during World War II, or amidst the the 1930s, “possibly the greatest single have never heard of the famous couple. chaos of the . Accord- work of man on the face of the earth.” When she gets to the lectures on Liang ing to Dallett, the archivist, they sent two Liang’s plan envisioned a total trans- and Lin, she says, “I can see students’ or three volumes of their drawings of formation of Beijing that combined the eyes kind of light up. They really are ex- temple woodwork back to Philadelphia preservation of the old with the construc- cited to see this aspect of Penn.” as a gift for their mentor Paul Cret. tion of the new. “He came back literally For Chinese international students, When the People’s Liberation Army to build a new China. That was his mis- the connection can be even more sig- was on the brink of taking over Beijing sion, that was his mandate,” Steinhardt nifi cant. “I think we sort of see the in- during China’s civil war, its leaders says. According to his plans, the old city creasing presence of international stu- asked Liang and Lin to help mark out was to become a public park, and adja- dents as a very recent phenomenon,” Fei any buildings of cultural value, so that cent satellite towns and industrial zones says. “For Chinese students, I think for they knew what to protect if fi ghting could be constructed in its outskirts. But a lot of them it’s very meaningful when extended into the city. After the estab- Mao Zedong rejected Liang’s proposal, they [see] we actually have got this long lishment of the People’s Republic in famously pledging to remake the me- connection between China and Penn.” 1949, Liang and Lin stayed in China to tropolis into “a forest of smokestacks.” When Alfred Bendiner was applying work with the new government and help “It’s a really human story,” Steinhardt for an honorary degree from Penn on shape the future of their country. Liang says. “It’s not that much of an exaggeration behalf of his friend Liang, he sent over a also hoped that a socialist government to say he gave his life to try to save the city three-page copy of the architect’s CV for would bring urban planning and pres- of Beijing, and he wasn’t successful.” Liang to check over before mailing it to ervation under centralized control. But Liang’s impact on modern Chinese the Penn administration. Liang returned The couple designed the Monument architecture—in tandem with Lin, his the copy with his corrections in black to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk that lifelong collaborator until her death— ink: an honorary degree from Princeton stands today in Square in remains unparalleled. While other First in 1947, the Chinese titles of monographs Beijing, though Lin did not live to see it Generation members went on to become from the 1930s, a couple of typos. completed. She died of tuberculosis in “pure architects,” Steinhardt sees Liang’s Under the heading “Creative Work in 1955, three years before construction infl uence manifested in numerous roles: Architecture”—a listing of the buildings fi nished on the obelisk and a decade be- architect, educator, academic, historic he’d designed—Liang had amended every fore the start of the Cultural Revolution, preservationist, and pioneer in fi eld entry, from “The Geology Building, Na- under which Liang was deemed a coun- work and restoration. tional ” to “a number of terrevolutionary and sent to the coun- Even now, Steinhardt says, Penn’s cam- residences and shops, etc.,” in his neat, tryside for re-education. pus is a site of near pilgrimage. Chinese cramped handwriting, so that they read: Liang’s second wife, Lin Zhu, hid his architects will come and ask to see notes and drawings to avoid the risk of where Liang took classes and sketched & Phyllis Lin; (Lin Hui–yin) confi scation; those papers later formed buildings, and students remain in awe in collaboration with Phyllis Lin his posthumous magnum opus, A Picto- of their predecessor. For “architecture in collaboration with Phyllis Lin; rial History of Chinese Architecture, students who come here,” she says, “this with Phyllis Lin which contains some of the only record- is where Liang studied.” with Phyllis Lin. ings of the structures he and Lin pains- Liang and Lin were born to well-off takingly chronicled in the 1930s. Liang families who represented the intellectual, Naomi Elegant C’19 lives in Hong Kong, where died in Beijing in 1972. cultural, and social elite of China. After she is a reporter for Fortune Magazine.

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