A Century Later, Penn-China Connections in Architecture Deepen
In January, Dean Steiner and Rossana Hu, the Miller Professor and chair of architecture, hosted a reception for Chinese alums in Shanghai.
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This May, Penn will award a posthumous Bachelor of Architecture degree to Lin Huiyin, the revered Chinese architect, poet, historian and preservationist who died in 1955.
Lin enrolled in architecture courses at Penn in 1924, a decade before the University began awarding architecture degrees to women. She was part of a cohort of 23 Chinese students who came to the university under a scholarship program funded by the US Congress after the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century. The students who studied design at Penn, then a global center of Beaux Arts education, returned to China and transformed the nation’s design culture, establishing Chinese modernism and inaugurating some of the first historic-preservation initiatives in the country. Lin (BFA'27) and her husband, Liang Sicheng (BArch'27, MArch’27), became household names.
Lin Huiyin with Liang Sicheng at the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, c. 1936. (Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection)
“All the men from China received full scholarships and Lin got half of one. She was the only woman and the only student who wasn’t allowed to get an architecture degree,” says Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner. “But she earned that degree.”
Late last year and early this year, Dean Steiner made two trips to China and Taiwan to give a series of invited lectures and prepare for upcoming presentations of Design With Nature Now, the exhibition organized by The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology in 2019. Dean Steiner visited Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing, and met with the mayor of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, where an exhibition is planned for the fall of 2024. He met with dozens of Penn alums, who have opened and led design practices in China and served in top academic posts at Tsinghua University, Tongji University, and Southeast University. At the Penn Wharton China Center in Beijing, Steiner delivered a lecture about Lin and met with members of her family. The School’s experience with Lin and her cohort in the early 20th century is “the origin of our very strong relationship” with Chinese designers and institutions, Steiner says.
Today, Chinese nationals make up the largest portion of international students at the Weitzman School, and there is a growing number of Chinese students studying historic preservation, Steiner says.
“There’s a shift going on in the construction industry in China toward more adaptive reuse. We see an upswing in interest in historic preservation,” he says.
Visitors to the Building in China exhibition at the Penn Wharton China Center
Thousands of Chinese designers and educators have studied at Penn over the last century. As a result, the School’s imprint on Chinese design culture is significant.
“When I was a college student, we studied materials that were inherited from Penn graduates in the 1920s and 1930s,” says Zhongjie Lin, the Benjamin Z. Lin Presidental Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning at the Weitzman School, who studied at Tongji University in Shanghai before coming to Penn for a PhD in Architectural History and Theory.
For a lecture at Taipei's Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, where the exhibition Design with Nature Now will be presented this fall, Dean Steiner was welcomed by alums Matt Chu (MLA'98) and Cathy Teng (MLA'92), president of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects.
Lin co-curated the exhibition Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture, organized in partnership with Southeast University and Tongji University and first presented at the Fisher Fine Arts Library in 2022. In addition to a group of contemporary architects who balance modernity and locality, the exhibition, which was subsequently presented at the Penn Wharton China Center, spotlighted the work of the first cohort of Chinese design students at Penn, who went on to found academic programs throughout China. Buildings they designed are still standing in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai, Lin says. The project was funded in part by Penn Global’s China Research and Engagement Fund.
“[Those buildings] kind of testify to their effort to bring Chinese society into modernity,” Lin says. “There was this very interesting dialogue between east and west, modern and traditional in their work.”
Liang and Lin helped design the Monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, near the mausoleum of Mao Zedong. Other proposals, like a new city plan for Beijing and efforts to preserve ancient walls around the city, were never realized. Academics and intellectuals were repressed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. But new partnerships between Penn and Chinese designers began forming at the end of the 20th century, as China experienced dramatic economic and social changes.
Dean Steiner (second from right) at the Penn Wharton China Center, with US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China Nicholas Burns (center), for the 2024 Penn China Engagement Forum. Pictured with (left to right) Katherine Strunk, George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education and dean of the Graduate School of Education; Boon Thau Loo, associate dean, Graduate Programs, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Amy Gadsden, associate vice provost for global initiatives and executive director of Penn China Initiatives at Penn Global; and Erika James, Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise, Professor of Management, and dean of the Wharton School.
Laurie Olin, practice professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the Weitzman School and founder of OLIN in Philadelphia, began taking students to Beijing for design studios in the late 1990s, partnering with the late architect and Weitzman faculty member Tony Atkin. Olin says they found the funding to run the studios independently of the school. Beijing was an ideal setting to study how urban landscapes are used, unlike anything in American cities. “There was a problem of public space in China,” Olin says. “They didn’t have a sizable middle class before, so they didn’t have a middle class landscape. They were going from an agrarian to a modern, high-tech country in one generation, and it was astonishing what was going on.”
Olin was recruited to establish a graduate department of landscape architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing. For several years he traveled back and forth from Philadelphia to Beijing, improvising to find materials and space to run courses at Tsinghua University. The department was founded in 2003, and Olin led it until 2005. Olin recruited Steiner to be a part of his Tsinghua teaching team.
AEDAS Global Design Principal Andy Wen (MArch'90) hosted fellow Weitzman alums in a January program at the firm's Beijing office organized by Weitzman Development & Alumni Relations.
Penn’s links with Chinese designers and institutions are growing stronger. In addition to the presentation in Taipei, a partnership with Taipei City Government and the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA), The McHarg Center is planning an exhibition based on Design With Nature Now in Nanjing later this spring. Rossana Hu, co-founder of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office in Shanghai, joined the Weitzman faculty as the Miller Professor and chair of the Department of Architecture in January. She was previously chair of the Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai. Hu says the legacy of Lin Huiyin is still a pillar of Chinese culture. “In the minds of Chinese women, she’s really high up there—admired by everyone. [Liang and Lin] are very well known, and not just because they’re architects,” she says.
Hu was born and raised in Taiwan, and studied and began practicing in the US before starting her firm in Shanghai. As someone who has twice moved to a different country, she says she is sensitive to the experience of Chinese students at Weitzman who may be navigating how much energy to invest in their time here. There are opportunities to build more formal partnerships with Chinese schools, but it’s important to make sure Weitzman’s existing student body, including Chinese students, feels a sense of connection to and ownership of their education.
“How at home do they feel and how well-invested are they in this institution?” Hu says. “We really want you to anchor yourself here.”
Rossana Hu outside Fisher Fine Arts Library (Photo Eric Sucar)
Meanwhile, alumni networks, formal and informal, keep former students from China and Taiwan connected with the school and with each other. Those relationships help alums build careers across the world. Andy Wen (MArch’90), the global board director at Aedas in Beijing, says his firm receives many portfolios each year from graduating Weitzman students. Many alums now work at the firm’s offices.
Matt Chu (MLA’98) worked at OLIN in Philadelphia for a decade after graduating in 1998. He later moved to Beijing and then Hong Kong to work for AECOM, and found a group of Penn alums there who would meet with Steiner and other school leaders when they were in town. Professional associations like the American Society of Landscape Architects, whose conference Chu says he attends every few years, also help keep former classmates in touch. Now working as a principal at SCAPE PLUS in Taiwan, Chu says his relationships with his Weitzman School cohort are still active.
“The people who graduated in the late ‘90s got very close, no matter whether they were in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, or the US,” Chu says. “[Getting] information through these people lets us all stay very close to the school.”