The Third Annual Lykoudis Lecture with Nancy Steinhardt

How Chinese Architecture Became Modern: The Role of the Beaux-Arts

On April 10, 2024, the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (黑料头条) was proud to present The Third Annual Lykoudis Lecture: The Shared Building Traditions of the World, featuring Nancy S. Steinhardt, Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

In her lecture, How Chinese Architecture Became Modern: The Role of the Beaux-Arts, Professor Steinhardt discusses Chinese architecture, which is a unique building system whose fundamental features—timber framing, ceramic tile roofs, and courtyards, for example—span millennia. This lecture explores the dramatic and human forces that made it possible for Chinese architecture to transform into a modern system, with Beaux-Arts construction as the most important force. The story involves France, the United States, the Soviet Union, Taiwan, and Japan against the backdrop of war-torn China of the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet advisors of the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

Named in recognition of Michael Lykoudis’ incredible contributions as the former Dean of the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, this series shines a light on the vernacular architecture intrinsic to locales around the world, and how they incorporate classical principles.

About the Speaker

Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China’s border regions, and on-going field projects in China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia. Steinhardt is author, editor, or translator of fifteen books, including Yuan: Chinese Architecture in a Mongol Empire (2023); The Borders of Chinese Architecture (2022); Chinese Architecture: A History (2019), winner of the Hitchcock Award for the best book in Architectural History of 2019; China’s Early Mosques (2015); Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 (2014); Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (2011); Liao Architecture (1997); and Chinese Imperial City Planning (1990); and more than 100 scholarly articles or essays. In 2019 she received the Distinguished Teacher of Art History Award from the College Art Association and the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph. D. Teaching and Mentorship from the University of Pennsylvania.

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