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Lu Yanzhi (1894-1929)
A Chinese architect trained at Cornell University

      Lu Yanzhi was one of the most significant of China's so-called "first generation" (di yidai) of architects who received their architectural training abroad between ca. 1915 and 1935, and then returned to China to practice. Lu is most renowned for two major commissions, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou (Canton), both completed after Lu's untimely death due to sickness in 1929.

     Born into a relatively wealthy family in Tianjin in 1894, Lu was sent with his sister to be educated in Paris, where he remained until 1908 when he returned to China to settle in Beijing. In 1911, when the Chinese Revolution overthrew the last Qing emperor, Lu entered prestigious Qinghua University and began to study engineering. At that time Qinghua did not have a full-fledged program of architectural studies, but those students such as Lu, possessing clear aptitude in architecture, construction or other related fields, had the option of applying to academic programs in the U.S. under the terms of the Boxer Indemnity Fund, established in 1908 as a scholarship fund for Chinese students. The fund's money stemmed from the Chinese government's being forced to pay retributions for the Boxer Rebellion (1900).

     In 1914 Lu was accepted by Cornell University to study mechanical engineering; however, after beginning his studies he switched to the field of architecture and graduated in December 1918. He then worked briefly as a draftsman in the "Oriental Department" of the New York City firm of Murphy & Dana, which was beginning to design a number of China commissions, primarily campus plans, for Qinghua University, Yale-in-China (Changsha, Hunan) and Fudan University (Shanghai). Lu assisted with the drafting and related design tasks associated with these and other projects until 1919, when he moved to Shanghai to work in Murphy & Dana's newly-established branch office there. Henry Murphy, the partner who spearheaded his firm's China-based operation, was impressed with Lu's skills and hoped he would work in Shanghai as one of the office's key architects. Lu assisted in some of the designs for Ginling College for Girls (Ginling nuzi daxue) in Nanjing, one of the most elaborate examples of what Murphy called an "adaptive Chinese Renaissance." However, when Murphy was traveling out of the Shanghai office, either in China or back in the U.S., Lu did not find the other western architects in the Shanghai branch to be as nurturing as Murphy.

     Consequently, he left Murphy's firm and began working with Chinese partners. In 1921 he established the Southeastern Architectural & Engineering Company (Dongnan jianzhu gongsi), one of the earliest Chinese architectural firms. Most of his design work during the early 1920s remains largely unknown. However, from a professional standpoint he was one of those young Chinese architects returning from the U.S. who began in 1924 to collaborate with Chinese colleagues in Shanghai, such as Fan Wenzhao and Zhuang Jun, regarding the creation of an architectural society so that Chinese architects could discuss issues and share strategies about architectural theory and practice. The Society of Chinese Architects (Zhongguo jianzhushi xuehui) came to fruition in 1928.

     In 1924, after the death of one of China's most important political leaders, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist government organized China's first major architectural competition of the 20th century to design a mausoleum for the fallen leader on a sloping knoll of Purple Hill overlooking the city of Nanjing. The competition, which attracted forty entries from China and abroad, provided a focus for Chinese architects to test their mettle against foreign competitors, and Lu's first prize design propelled him into the architectural vanguard. Because of its high standards of design and construction, the mausoleum (1926-1931), completed two years after Lu's death, was widely praised by contemporaries and has become a major Chinese monument of the 20th century, aided by how Sun Yat-sen is also hailed as a revolutionary hero by the People's Republic.

     Lu's concept was to reflect, architecturally, Sun Yat-sen's ideals about combining traditional Chinese philosophical principles with more up-to-date scientific practices. To achieve this, Lu retained certain Chinese architectural forms, such as the temple and a traditional gateway (pailou), but he utilized reinforced concrete as a major structural material. After visitors approached the site via a long, cypress-lined causeway, they entered it through the pailou and then ascended a long flight of steps to reach a memorial hall which, because of its glazed tile roof and sweeping eaves, resembled a Chinese temple but which was erected using a concrete frame infilled with brick walls and faced with Kowloon granite. The hall contained a seated statue of Dr. Sun similar to that of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Sun Yat-sen's tomb, located behind the memorial hall and accessed by it, was (and still is) within a double-shelled concrete dome also faced in granite. Lu designed the tomb so that the exterior form would be similar to imperial tombs found elsewhere in China. However, on the interior he used the precedents of Napoleon's Tomb in Paris and Grant's Tomb in New York so viewers could reflect upon the central sarcophagus from behind a balustrade.

     In April 1926, a month after the mausoleum's groundbreaking, Lu won a second competition memorializing Sun Yat-sen, this time in Guangzhou, the city where Sun first mobilized his political forces and also where Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government was inaugurated in 1926. Lu's concept for the Memorial Hall (jiniantang) was somewhat similar to that of the mausoleum because of how it sought to balance Chinese architectural form with western construction technologies, but it was different because of its site (within, rather than outside the city of Guangzhou), its size (210' X 240' in plan, 160' in height and accommodating 5000 people) and its structural nature (a steel frame with reinforced concrete walls). Voh-Kee, the company that initiated the hall's construction in April 1928, became China's foremost construction firm until 1949, when it briefly moved to Hong Kong and then became re-established in Taiwan. After Lu's death, design supervision of the hall was assumed by Lu's friend, Fan Wenzhao.

© Jeffrey W. Cody

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