An alternative path architect Leon Hoa and his career

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the oeuvre of Leon Hoa(华揽洪), the Chinese ar-chitect who lived from 1912 to 2012. Through a close examination of his learning and practicing in France and influential projects in China, His career spanned a remarkable alternative path that was quite different from the mainstream of the 1950s, which only combined modern function with traditional icons that as a re-sult of the purge of Socialist Realism, presented a compromised eclecticism rather than a revival of the Chinese neo-classicism of the 1930s. Hoa’s major projects reveal that his path was an integrity of pursuing rationality and respecting tradition, that could be interpreted in three ways: by a city fabric, architectural form and/or structural logic.

Through the scrutinizing of Socialist Realism and Beaux-arts doctrine, Hoa’s attitude to form was discovered as an innovation that departed from symbolic decoration. The traditional spirit of Chinese architecture was reconstructed by proportion, horizontal volume and metaphoric components with function.

Delving into the modern history of construction development, especially indus-trialization and prefabricated technology, the dissertation argues that Hoa tried to renew tradition architecture with the inspiration from novel construction technol-ogy. Different from the creed of formal aesthetics was the incarnation of construc-tion rationality, as Liang Sicheng represented and insisted. Hoa restored conven-tion building structure to an essential logic as load-bearing and infilling system. He attempted to orchestrate a new prototype of Chinese tradition architecture, which could not only reflect tradition spirit but also adapt for mass housing production.

As his projects frequently been labeled as functional rationality, through de-tailed analysis, the dissertation wants to reveal the uniqueness of Hoa’s practice, which integrated three principles: industrialization as technology, social housing as humanity, and traditional reflection as innovation. Even his projects under the scarce circumstance and political restriction in the 1950s, his legacy continues to resonate in the world of contemporary Chinese architectural history and theory.