Open and reveal the scenery - literature and architecture question each other

Author: Ruan Qingyue / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Ruan Qingyue is a renowned Taiwanese architectural critic and novelist. He had long been expanding in both fields separately but decided this time to merge his expertise, creating a mutual inspiration and questioning between literature (primarily European classical literature) and architecture (primarily Western contemporary architecture). What he does in the book is not a general comparison between architecture and literature but emphasizes how they spiritually inspire the author in analyzing cities/architecture. It is a reflective that transcends the usual academic analogies. Beyond responding to technology, budgets, and practical needs, architecture should also reflect a thoughtful approach to creating a humane environment. The difficulties and challenges of the creative process, intertwined with real-world temptations, require choices between what should and should not be done—perhaps it’s time to return and see if one has stayed true to their original intentions. When facing various difficulties (or temptations), does the designer still adhere to their original vision, striving to break through and complete the project? Good architecture is not necessarily a product of the best innate conditions but rather one that responds appropriately within its existing constraints, with neither arrogance nor subservience. Literature also has its own original intentions, and whether it deviates from them is what I believe determines the authenticity of literary creation. That is why I can draw parallels between literature and architecture—they are fundamentally the same when facing reflections on "honesty and appropriateness."
The architect I deeply respect, the Taiwanese architect Wang Daliang, whom I greatly admire, once spent ten years translating and rewriting Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wang’s translation is titled Du Liankui, which is an interesting name with a martial arts flavor reminiscent of Water Margin characters). However, I have always struggled to associate Wang Daliang’s architectural works, which he considered his duty to uphold tradition, with Oscar Wilde, who challenged his contemporaries’ social morality with a shocking, rebellious, and iconoclastic attitude. "Why did you choose Wilde to translate?" I once asked him directly. "There was no particular reason," he replied calmly. "Why Wilde specifically?" "For no reason," he paused, then added, "I just wanted to practice my Chinese." This answer disappointed and frustrated me, so I persistently pursued various possibilities. Oscar Wilde, who advocated for art’s purity and independence from moral standards, promoted "aestheticism" rooted in Greek aesthetics, which differed greatly from the Puritanical Victorian era he lived in. His actions, which he carried out with the futile determination of a mantis trying to stop a car (and ultimately led to his imprisonment for two years, dying shortly after his release), can be seen as an outcry against the ignorance of his time, protesting the distant, mythic Greek civilization that acknowledged the coexistence of gods of good and evil and accepted the nature of desire. In an early article, Wang Daliang expressed a nostalgic admiration for Greece and Wilde. The article compared his undergraduate studies at Cambridge with his graduate studies at Harvard (where he studied under Walter Gropius, a founding member of the Bauhaus, and was a classmate of I.M. Pei): Harvard pursued academic and technical skills as a means of survival, not as a way of life, while Cambridge was filled with leisure and elegance, seeking not just knowledge but a richer, more holistic life—what ancient Greece called holistic education. Harvard could produce a President Kennedy, but not an Oscar Wilde. Only Oxford or Cambridge could cultivate a Wilde. It seems there is a connection here. However, Wang Daliang’s architectural works have always seriously considered how Western modern architecture could align with traditional Chinese architectural art in terms of aesthetics. For example, the National Palace Museum and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taipei explore the possibility of expressing the beauty of traditional wooden structures through reinforced concrete. His several self-designed homes (in Jiankang South Road, Jinan Road, and Shipai in Taipei) reveal his admiration and pursuit of the traditional Chinese scholar’s home life. At the same time, he responds to architectural materials and construction methods with extreme discipline, preferring raw, simple concrete to deliberately cater to popular tastes.
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