3.4 Coda: Between Memory and Blueprint
From Liang Sicheng’s grammar of beams and brackets to I.M. Pei’s quiet syntax of space, a generation stood between ruin and rebirth, seeking not merely to build, but to remember how to build.
Their paths diverged—one in search of continuity, the other in search of transformation—but both asked the same question:
What does it mean to be modern, and still remain Chinese?
This question, seeded in classrooms and project sites, whispered in journals and inked in studio sketches, would echo into the next chapter of China’s architectural journey.
For those of us who sat in lecture halls decades later, listening to professors like Jin Qiuye retell these stories—not merely as nostalgia or history, but as unfinished threads—the search continues.
And so we step into the next chapter:
A time of opening, of possibility, and of peril.
When the market became the new ideology, and spectacle the new syntax.
What remains of tradition when it becomes a brand?
And can modernity still carry meaning, when it is for sale?