“YELLOW OF THE EAST AND WHITE FROM THE WEST”: HARDY WILSON'S GRECIAN AND CHINESE ARCHITECTURE (1937)
Title:
“YELLOW OF THE EAST AND WHITE FROM THE WEST”: HARDY WILSON'S GRECIAN AND CHINESE ARCHITECTURE (1937)
Author:
Fung, Stanislaus Jackson, Mark
Appeared in:
Architectural theory review
Paging:
Volume 1 (1996) nr. 1 pages 63-68
Year:
1996-04
Contents:
In the present paper, we propose to offer a few preliminary remarks towards the task of considering Hardy Wilson's interest in Chinese architecture. An interest in Chinese architecture has never been a very important part of the self-image of modern Australian architects. Even today, when professional interest in undertaking work in Asia is stronger than ever, Hardy Wilson's up-front appreciation of the importance of Chinese architecture stands without parallel. In the standard accounts of modern Australian architecture, however, Wilson's interest in Chinese architecture is commonly portrayed as a matter of genteel sensibility for an exotic tradition, secondary to his role in the development of modernism in Australian architecture, which takes, it would appear, the form of an aesthetic sensibility that can be conveniently emplotted as a precursor to the aesthetic sensibilities of modernism as they came to be recognized after Wilson's death in 19551 There is some irony in this received image of Wilson. As an Australian who spent a short time in China, who developed a life-long interest in the importance of what the Chinese race has to offer a new world civilization that Wilson sought to promote, and who has not a single major building to his credit, it is odd that his important encounter with a cultural other turned out to be a sideline while Wilson helped usher in modern Australian architectural design that is consonant with American and European sensibilities.
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