Asian Art and History

Lecture

Asian Art and History How Chinese Architecture Became Modern

Nancy Steinhardt, Ph.D., Curator of Chinese Art, University of Pennsylvania

Chinese architecture is a unique building tradition whose fundamental features — timber framing, ceramic tile roof, construction around courtyards, for example — span millennia. This lecture begins with support for this statement. It then explores the dramatic and human factors that brought about modernism beginning around 1840. The political and emotional story this lecture tells involves architects and patrons from Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Japan and the United States. It involves teachers and students, wars and revolutions, that led to China’s transformation into a global power with mega tall and twisted metal buildings designed by the most influential architects of the 21st century.

This presentation is part of the Asian Art and History series.

Nancy Steinhardt

Nancy Steinhardt

Nancy Steinhardt, Ph.D., is professor of East Asian art and curator of Chinese art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1982. She received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1981 and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard from 1978 to 1981. Steinhardt taught at Bryn Mawr from 1981 to 1982. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China’s border regions, particularly problems that result from the interaction between Chinese art and that of peoples to the north, northeast and northwest.