Look at a Leopard Through a Pipe
Visualizing Sigfried Giedion's Modernism in Tongji University’s Book Culture 1952–1982
26 February – 04 April 2025
Opening: 25 February 2025, 6 pm
Round Table: 27 February 2025, 5.30 pm
“Modern” architecture, introduced in China at the end of the 19th century, gradually replaced traditional construction methods. With the return of Chinese architects educated in Japan, Europe, and the United States from the 1920s onward, architecture and engineering became independent disciplines, as a result of which various institutions began offering courses in architectural history. In 1952, the new China reorganized Tongji University into an institute devoted to the study of engineering disciplines and establish a Department of Architecture with a specialized Teaching and Research Section of Architectural (Theory and) History, which included preliminary courses.
Within this section, a small team, under the leadership of LUO Xiaowei, was set up to focus on “Occidental” and foreign countries. The team produced a series of textbooks and in-house reference materials, aimed at reconstructing narratives within a Marxist and Maoist framework. The material addressed not only ancient and classical architectural history, but also introduced and criticized modern architecture. From the 1950s to the 1970s, in a political climate shaped by the “Three Revolutions” and in the radical organizational form of the “May 7th” Commune at Tongji, this group concentrated on applying radical pedagogy to architectural history and theory. Among other things, their work culminated in the national textbook Modern History of Architecture in Foreign Countries (1982), co-produced by Tongji and three other universities, which had long dominated the teaching of modern architectural history in China.
Chinese teachers had to rely on works published in the West in doing research for their textbooks on the history of foreign architecture. Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture became a key source for analyzing the modern architectural movement, particularly in capitalist countries. Many of Giedion's illustrations were selected for different textbooks at Tongji and incorporated into an idealistic pedagogical model that emphasized a "pictorial" history of architecture.
There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Look at a leopard through a pipe – you can see only one spot.” The discussion of Giedion’s writings on modern architectural history is like peeping through his “pipe” at Western arts. The Tongji University textbooks collected, synthesized, and restructured the spots he observed along with other spots. This process not only adhered to the long-standing tradition of collecting and shifting knowledge across cultures; it also served a newly established discipline in China.
The reassembled spots shimmer through the Section’s “pipes,” pragmatically absorbing ancient knowledge, taking a twofold attitude toward modernism, and aspiring to provide a panoramic view of world architecture. The exhibition itself also acts as a “pipe,” offering a glimpse into the process of knowledge traveling and shifting between the East and the West.
Those textbooks from Tongji in the early second half of the 20th century were like small stones cast into a pool of thinking, as demonstrated by the direct relationship between historical/theoretical studies and practical production. They addressed organizational structures, (re)production of historical materials, radical pedagogy, awareness of visual media, industrial and architectural output, labor, colonialism, environmental concerns, and resources. Although Swiss-Sino knowledge transfer and cultural influences faced significant political obstacles at that time, they were not entirely undermined by those tensions. Today, as we confront new crises in the environment, in energy, economics, politics, and architecture itself, we hope these stones from decades past might still create some ripples.