In the environmental course I teach at HNC, we cover urbanization – and that gives me a chance to briefly address urban design, the “City Beautiful” movement evident in the 1920s in both Philadelphia and Nanjing (during the ‘Golden Decade’ between 1927 and 1937 in the latter), as well as the work of Henry Killam Murphy and other architect/city planners (both Chinese and American).

As mentioned in a previous posting about Murphy, many of those Chinese architects had attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early decades of the 20th Century, and two especially renowned student/practitioners were Liang Sicheng and his wife, Lin Huiyin. Their fascinating story is told in a book by Wilma Fairbank (wife of John King Fairbank, Harvard’s eminent historian of modern China) – and my Spring HNC course recently gave me an excuse to not only read the Fairbank book, but also to dig back into the Liang/Lin story in two other previous works.

Penn was famous in the early 1900s for French-born Paul Philippe Cret, Professor of Architectural Design who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and taught that approach for almost three decades to his Penn students. The impact on Chinese architecture was later explored in a conference held at Penn in 2003 (and the basis for a book shown above, co-edited by Jeffrey Cody, the same author who wrote about Henry Killam Murphy).

Penn’s School of Design (formerly the School of Fine Arts) was also the subject of a centennial work published in 1990 documenting its illustrious history, including not only Beaux Arts practitioners like Cret, but also Louis Kahn, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, etc. I was honored to have my own work on acid rain highlighted in that book too, because my co-author (and dissertation advisor) was Stephen L. Feldman, who became Chair of the City and Regional Planning Department in 1984. Stephen invited me to teach an environmental course, and that became the major spur for my second book, which targeted urban environmental management.

I use such materials in teaching today’s HNC course, and the Liang/Lin material in all three works adds an important dimension. Liang and Lin are both very well known in China – they have been “elevated to near-mythical romantic status” in popular culture there, with soap operas and documentaries…. and even an opera! Liang was (and still is) the foremost historian of Chinese architecture over millennia, and he was Chinese consultant on the design of the UN Headquarters building in 1947. Lin could not be a student in Penn’s Architecture Department since she was a woman – but she nonetheless graduated from the School; somehow managed to serve as an instructor in the Department; was hired as a Professor when she returned to China; and also found time to write and publish well-regarded poetry and prose.

Together they designed the Monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and were consultants in re-building China after the war — but their lives were very complicated after their return to China by the Japanese incursion, World War II, the civil war, and years of subsequent cultural turmoil. Their influence is still felt here in the US, however — Lin’s niece, the American architect Maya Lin, was the 21-year old Yale undergraduate who won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC in 1981, and who has readily acknowledged the influence of Lin Huiyin on her life.