3.1   Liang Sicheng and the Grammar of Tradition







To speak of the modernisation of Chinese architecture without invoking Liang Sicheng would be like speaking of Chinese poetry without Li Bai. He is not merely a historical figure—he is an axis around which the struggle between tradition and modernity, memory and ambition, has long revolved.

Born into the late imperial elite, son of the reformist scholar Liang Qichao, Liang Sicheng carried within him a unique inheritance: a deep reverence for classical Chinese culture and a keen awareness of its precarious future. Educated first at Tsinghua and then at the University of Pennsylvania, Liang returned to China in the 1920s not as a romantic preservationist, but as a modernist in dialogue with the past. His goal was never to freeze tradition under glass, but to translate it—to find a living grammar within it.

This “grammar” became both metaphor and method. Working with Lin Huiyin and others, Liang travelled across China in the 1930s and ’40s, meticulously documenting wooden structures that had survived centuries of war, weather, and dynastic change. What he discovered was not simply a collection of buildings, but a syntax—a system of brackets, beams, and proportions that underpinned Chinese architecture like the rules of verse in classical poetry.

His writings, including annotated studies of the Yingzao Fashi and the first comprehensive History of Chinese Architecture, sought to codify these elements not for nostalgia, but for transmission. His drawings adopted Western architectural standards, with plans and sections, and were the first of their kind to record traditional Chinese architecture in such a methodical and systematic way—moving beyond oral tradition and apprenticeship. His History of Chinese Architecture became, in a sense, the Sir Banister Fletcher of China—a foundational text that bridged technical knowledge and cultural memory.




Liang’s dream was to modernise Chinese architecture not by imitating the West, but by articulating a native system capable of contemporary expression.

Yet he was no mere academic. As a designer, Liang experimented with this vision in practice—especially in the early years of the People’s Republic. His work on buildings such as the China Art Gallery (1959) exemplified an attempt to synthesise traditional forms—pitched roofs, bracket sets, axial symmetry—with modern construction methods and programmatic requirements. It was an architectural Esperanto: legible to both past and present, East and West.

But it was also fragile.

By the 1950s, the Party’s vision for architecture tilted toward ideological spectacle. Liang’s pleas for preservation—of Beijing’s city walls, of traditional neighbourhoods, of cultural continuity—were dismissed as bourgeois sentimentality. Liang was silenced—but not forgotten. His writings continued to circulate in whispers and in photocopies, passed between students and young architects during the Cultural Revolution, when even to speak of fengshui was subversive. His grammar of tradition became a quiet resistance—a reminder that architecture could be more than concrete and command.

As the post-Mao thaw began in the late 1970s, Liang’s ideas regained urgency. China was modernising at breakneck speed, yet its architectural identity remained unformed, unguarded, and profoundly vulnerable. In that moment of uncertain transition, Liang re-emerged—not in person (he had passed away in 1972), but in principle: as a voice calling not to return, but to remember.

To remember that modernity need not mean amnesia.
To remember that roofs, columns, and courtyards are not just relics, but rhythms, proportions—and more importantly, life within.
To remember that architecture is not merely about new forms—but about choosing what not to destroy, and what to carry forward.

Liang did not give us a final answer.
He gave us a language with which to ask the question.