Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture Available to Purchase

From late January through May 2022, the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design hosted an exhibition titled Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture.¹ The installation consisted of two parts, “History” and “Contemporary,” and involved two different but adjacent spaces. Located at the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives’ Kroiz Gallery, the first section focused on the coursework of twenty-three Chinese students who studied at Penn from 1918 through 1937—often considered the first generation of academically trained Chinese architects—as well as the projects they completed after returning to China in the expanding metropolises of Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, and Tianjin (Figure 1). The second section, staged at the Fisher Fine Arts Library, portrayed an image of contemporary architectural innovation in China, focusing on the work of two prominent Chinese architectural firms: Atelier FCJZ, led by Yong Ho Chang and Lijia Lu in Beijing, and...