Venue: Third Floor, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen
Date: 6 to 20 Dec, 2009

“Under the Sun: A Retrospective of Architect Hsia Chang-shi”, the only solo exhibition ever offered to an individual architect for the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, will be held at Guan Shanyue Art Museum during the 2009 event.

Hsia Chang-shi, born in 1905, earned a PhD in art history in Germany before teaching in a number of well-known Chinese architecture schools. He created his best work for the southern part of his country during his tenure at South China University of Technology. As a key explorer, practitioner and promoter of modernism in China, he neither simply transplanted the ideas, technologies and forms of German modern architecture nor wrapped the vernacular over modern techniques and materials. Rather, he began a search for a spatial spirit rooted in the traditional local culture and climate of south China, applying it to modern forms that fit the technological conditions of the time. Returning to his hometown, he established modern architecture in the Lingnan region and created a wellspring of ideas and forms for Lingnan style architecture.

This exhibition leverages the career of the architect in an attempt to reveal and elevate this fading period of history and untangle the complicated strands of the development of Lingnan style modern architecture. It will review the works of Hsia Chang-shi through architectural and construction models, historical photos, books, essays, blueprints, sketches and other sources. The exhibition will also explore the development of Lingnan style in general through short films and animation. In addition, some conceptual models of student work on the theme “Meditation on Light in the Manner of Hsia Chang-shi” will be included. Finally, themed forums on Hsia Chang-shi and the Lingnan style will be held during the exhibition period.

The retrospective is an intensive investigation of Chinese modern architecture through an individual practitioner. It reviews the architectural thinking and practice of the architect, presenting the efforts and achievements of Chinese architects in their exploration of the localization of architecture under the modern context. The exhibition shares the refined construction method and technological aesthetics of Hsia Chang-shi’s designs, revealing his profound influence on Lingnan style. Its goal is to educate and enlighten, or to bring about a reflection on contemporary architecture: has architecture today lost what such first-generation architects cultivated, namely respect for local characteristics and the creation of a unique design ethic through the absorption of Western thinking and technology?

The exhibition is organised by the School of Architecture, Research Center of Architectural History and Culture, South China University of Technology (SCUT) and curated by Feng Jiang, Xiao Yiqiang and Song Gang.

*An aerial view of the Hall of Fisheries in the Exposition of Lingnan Local Products.

Hsia Chang-shi (1905 – 1996) was a Chinese architect born in Guangzhou. He was educated in both traditional Chinese and Western culture from an early age, later attending the University of Karlsruhe in Germany in 1923 and graduating with a degree in architecture before obtaining a PhD in art history from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen in 1932. After returning to China, he worked in architectural studios in Shanghai and then Guangzhou while simultaneously serving at the Ministry of Railway, Ministry of Transport and Ping-Han Railway Administration Bureau for the government. In 1934, he became a member of both the Architectural Society of China and the China Building Society and began attending investigations of architecture all over China and conducting surveys of historical buildings in Suzhou. He became a professor in 1940, lecturing at the National Art Institute, Tongji University, Central University and Chongqing University. In 1946, he began to instruct at Sun Yat-Sen University and South China University of Technology (SCUT). Through varied experiences of education, research into vernacular dwelling, and professional practice as an architect, Hsia Chang-shi, along with Chen Boqi, Long Qingzhong and others, has been a main driving force of architectural education, research, and architectural design in South China. He is regarded as a pioneer of Lingnan style and his thinking has become a great source of its philosophy and methodology. Many later architects and educators, including Mo Bozhi and He Jingtang, received training under his instruction. Hsia Chang-shi was affected by the Cultural Revolution and moved to Germany in 1973, remaining there until his death in 1996 at the age of 93 in Freiburg, Germany.

Hsia Chang-shi’s representative works include institutional buildings at Sun Yat-Sen University and Zhongshan School of Medicine, the Hall of Fisheries in the Exposition of Lingnan Local Products, and the Faculty Sanatorium in Dinghu Mountain, Zhaoqing, among others. His published work is titled “Key Principles of Garden Design” (SCUT Press, 1995).

Architecture in south China is as fickle as its weather.

After centuries of repetitive architectural practice, the Lingnan architectural style gradually formed and matured between the Ming and Qing dynasties. In Guangzhou, bricks, ocher tiles, stones and black oil putty are uniquely wrapped around the outside of a wooden framework—in its use of numerous components and the effects of their combination and duplication, Lingnan style impresses with its dignity and heaviness.

Since the completion of Martin Hall in Lingnan University at the beginning of the 20th century, foreign bricks, cement, and concrete have appeared alongside Chinese-style glazed tiles, large roofs and ornamentation in local architecture. The technology has been westernized, but local architects still strive to maintain cultural tradition and self-identity. In the history of modernization in the region, the use of arcade-house architecture from colonial southeast Asia was also common.

The 1950s marked a turning point for architects in south China. Hsia Chang-shi and his colleagues adopted technology and design adapted to the local climate, and new methods for sun-shading, insulation and ventilation were developed. The traditional brick and wood structure was replaced by the frame.

Hsia Chang-shi worked within the spirit of Chinese landscape architecture and created his own architectural language, including what we now call “Hsia-style” sun-shading. Influenced by this theory and practice, Mo Bozhi and other architects continued and developed the same style, gradually forming a new Lingnan school of architecture beginning in the 1970s.

*Images show the example (the buildings of Zhongshan School of Medicine) and graphic structure of Hsia’s famous sun-blocking structure.