Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, May 18 (Xinhua) -- On May 17, Xinhua Daily Telegraph published a report entitled "The Sum of Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Code of the Beauty of Ancient Chinese Architecture".
In May 2024, Wang Nan's paper, "Heaven and Earth, Circle and Square Pagoda Statues in One: An Analysis of the Compositional Proportions and Scales of the Architectural Space, Statue Groups and Murals of Yingxian Wooden Towers", will be published in Religions, an A&HCI journal, which is known as SCI in the field of arts and humanities.
"This is a very original research topic." An expert review wrote:
The core of the paper is the research of this senior engineer of the Palace Museum in recent years: the proportion of composition based on square and circle drawing, especially the important proportion widely used by ancient Chinese in urban planning, building group layout, and architectural design.
This is the first time that the findings have been systematically presented in an English-language journal. The new voice answers an old question: Western classical architecture has a strict pursuit of beauty and proportion, and the "golden ratio" that is regarded as the norm by architects and artists is the representative. What about China, which has a history of thousands of years?
"After several generations of continuous research, today we can say that the answer is yes." Wang Nan said.
There is no shortage of ups and downs and coincidences in the process of answering, but if we look a little further, it is not difficult to see the relay of several generations of scholars over the decades, the inheritance of countless craftsmen for hundreds of years, and the continuation of a civilization and her cosmology for thousands of years.
More importantly, perhaps, this is an answer to history, but also to the future – how do we create a beautiful building?
Ancient Chinese architecture, is there a pursuit of beauty proportions?
After seeing countless ancient buildings, what impressed Wang Nan was an inconspicuous corner of a temple.
It was Biyun Temple in Xiangshan, Beijing. In 2012, they went to survey, and at noon, a few people went around the corner of the front yard porch to rest. It was far away from the central hall, just the corner of the corridor, and the friends who were traveling with him suddenly sighed, "It's all here, and it's still so beautiful at a glance!" ”
Wang Nan remembered this sentence until now. "There are very old and even very dilapidated ancient Chinese buildings, but there are almost no ugly ones. There is no need for a lot of carvings, even if it is a very ordinary small house, it looks beautiful. What is the reason for this? ”
At that time, as a lecturer at the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University, he was participating in the writing of a series of books on ancient architecture, thinking that "I have to draw some beautiful surveying drawings of ancient buildings and put them in the book", so he picked up the surveying and mapping tools.
On the day of the measurement of the Wuta Temple in Beijing, it was catching up with the haze, and the total station kept reporting errors, and Wang Nan was ready to check it again the next day. Unexpectedly, the total height of the two days was more than a meter different. Based on the corrected data, he found that the overall height-to-width ratio of the Vajra Throne Tower of the Five Pagodas Temple was 7:5.
This mistake made Wang Nan deeply impressed for the first time that "the overall height-to-width ratio of an ancient Chinese building is a perfect integer ratio".
But it almost all stopped here.
Across the front is a question that has reverberated for decades: did ancient Chinese architecture have the pursuit of beauty and proportion?
In 1980, Wang Guixiang, who was studying architectural history at Tsinghua University, followed his teacher, the famous architectural historian Mo Zongjiang, to Fuzhou to survey and map Hualin Temple. While drawing the map, Wang Guixiang noticed a set of numbers - from the cross-section, the distance from the center of the ground to the eaves on both sides was the same as the distance to the epithelium of the ridge, which had not been written in the previous report, and he thought of a semicircle. Then he found that the height of the upper skin of the inner pillar of the temple was 1.41 times the height of the top of the inner pillar, and he immediately thought of the circle and the square—the diameter of the outer circle of the square is twice the length of the side of the square (about 1.414)—is this deliberate?
Soon after, Wang Guixiang followed Mo Zongjiang to survey and map the White Tower of Hangzhou Gate. When he returned to Beijing to draw the section of the outer eaves of the tower, Mo Zongjiang found that there was also a 1.41 times relationship between the eaves height and the column height, and he excitedly called Wang Guixiang over and said, you are right.
Soon, after studying more than 20 wooden buildings of the Tang and Song dynasties, such as the mountain gate of Dule Temple and Nanchan Temple, Wang Guixiang found that there were compositional proportions in different aspects such as eaves height and column height, width and depth, width and width of the bright and secondary rooms. He linked this ratio to the ancient Chinese concept of "the sky is round and the place is round".
"The ancients did not necessarily understand this irrational number, but they gained an understanding of this number from the relationship between the circle and the square, and it is easy to draw a square and a circle." He believes that the use of this proportion is related to the pursuit of aesthetic visual effects, which can make the two parts "have a clearer relationship and have an appropriate transition, resulting in the so-called 'no or not' visual effect".
But it didn't take long for reminders to follow. Someone told him, "This thing has been studied by Europeans for hundreds of years, you must not touch it, touching this thing will be fruitless." ”
Coupled with the fact that data and data were difficult to obtain at that time, research had to be put on hold. At the end of one of his treatises, he wrote, "[This ratio] may have been quite common in the Tang and Song dynasties, not only in single-eaves buildings, but also in pavilions or tower buildings." …… From the Tang and Song dynasties to the Qin and Han dynasties, or to the Ming and Qing dynasties, it is still an unsolved mystery whether it is possible to find similar or related proportional treatment rules, which needs to be continued by academic colleagues. ”
A few years later, Wang Nan, who was studying for a doctorate, saw the research of Wang Guixiang, who was already a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Architecture, and his first reaction was to be suspicious - "I always feel that this is something that belongs to Westerners, as if Chinese should not have this kind of gene." ”
Even if he found the proportions of the King Kong Throne Tower of the Five Pagoda Temple, he still had doubts. "Misled by my own long-standing prejudices. Because the Vajra Throne Pagoda is from India, we feel that it seems that Indian architecture, like Western architecture, also attaches great importance to proportion. I don't believe that ancient Chinese craftsmen would do things like this. ”
The ubiquitous "Sum of Heaven and Earth"
Fortunately, the revelation from the Five Pagodas Temple was too profound. With the idea of giving it a try, Wang Nan surveyed and mapped several ancient buildings, and found that there was a clear proportional relationship between the total outline dimensions.
This was not what he expected. Can't wait to survey and map one by one, he found the published surveying and mapping data and plunged into it. The other topics he wanted to do were all abandoned, and the few books he promised the publisher were also shelved, which he felt was a "top priority". "Even if it turns out to be incorrect, it shows that ancient Chinese craftsmen really did not pursue classical proportions, which is also an important scientific conclusion."
Unexpectedly, more and more compositional ratios were found, 7:5, 10:7, 6:7, 7:8, 3:2...... There are also a large number of proportions that are difficult to get an integer. When he was researching for almost two years, he did an internal discussion with a friend, and they all felt that there were many cases and proportions - the question is, what is the law that governs these proportions?
That night, Wang Nan completely lost sleep. Tossing and turning, he suddenly remembered that a scholar had inadvertently mentioned the compass during the day. "I've always studied proportions by drawing rectangles, and I've never thought about circles. Looking back and rethinking the ratio proposed by Mr. Wang Guixiang, it is the relationship between the circle and the square. The next day, he talked to Wang Jun, a research librarian at the Palace Museum, about his idea, and the two drew a sketch of a square circle on a paper towel in the café, and the more he painted, the more he felt, "This is probably the root of that series of proportions."
It is the most basic proportional relationship between the square and its outer circle, which the ancients simplified to an integer ratio of 7:5 or 10:7 (7:5=1.4; 10:7≈1.428), and the craftsman's mantra of "square five oblique seven" has been passed down to this day. At the same time, the two adjacent corners of the square are used as the center of the circle, and the side length is the radius to make a circle, and the intersection points are connected, and an equilateral triangle can be obtained, including the rectangle of the equilateral triangle, and the ratio of the short side to the long side is, which was also replaced by the ancients with an integer ratio of 6:7 or 7:8. Such a rectangular composition was discovered by Wang Shusheng, then a professor at Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, in his research on the plan of Chang'an City in the Sui and Tang dynasties in 2009.
At this time, many of the previously unresolved proportional figures are no longer "hanging". Wang Nan decided to recalculate the hundreds of cases accumulated according to the new ideas. As a result, it gushed out like a "flood".
For example, the three major halls of the Forbidden City have both compositional and compositional proportions. Another example is the most important Tang Dynasty wooden building in China, the east hall of Foguang Temple, with a height and width ratio of 1:2. What's even more interesting is that this ratio happens to be the width and height ratio of the world's largest existing wooden pagoda in Yingxian County, the composition of the two national treasures, which is exactly 90 degrees.
It was during this process that a study by Feng Shi, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, attracted Wang Nan's attention. In the Niuheliang Hongshan cultural site more than 5,000 years ago, archaeological excavations have unearthed a group of mounds and square mounds, Feng Shi found that the sacrificial mounds are represented by triple round altars from the summer solstice, winter solstice, spring equinox, and autumn equinox, and the diameters of the three concentric circles are 11 meters, 15.6 meters, and 22 meters respectively, showing a multiple relationship.
Prior to this, the earliest case analyzed by Wang Nan was Chang'an City in the Han Dynasty, and the Niuheliang site was more than 3,000 years earlier, which he did not expect. After collecting archaeological reports "hungry and thirsty" and sorting them down all the way, he found that from Yanshi Erlitou to Qishan Fengxiao Western Zhou ritual building ruins, "some early architectural ruins that seemed to be irregular are using these proportions."
Seeing that there are more and more cases, the last hammer is still difficult to fall. Scientific arguments require both examples and documents, in other words, whether the speculation is correct or not, and the "testimony" of the ancients, the latter has never appeared.
When he was at a loss, he took out a copy of the Northern Song Dynasty's "Building the French Style" from the bookshelf, flipped through it casually, and the first picture was the "Circle Square Circle Diagram" that showed the connection and tangent of the circles. The most important surviving book on ancient architecture in China also quotes a passage from the even older work of astronomy and mathematics, the Zhou Ji Sutra: "All things are circumferential and circular, and the master craftsmen make and the rules are set." ”
Liang Sicheng's "Annotation on the Construction of the French Style" Wang Nan has read many times, and has never seen the "round square circle diagram" in the text, and later learned that in order to facilitate researchers, Liang Sicheng redrew many illustrations of the original book as modern engineering drawings, but this most important first illustration, due to historical reasons did not redraw, the original drawings were included in the appendix. "In the original book of "Constructing the French Style", it is the first picture, and in the "General Theory" part, the "General Theory" is the core of understanding the entire French style." Wang Nan said, "In this way, the importance of compositional proportions based on square and circle drawings for ancient Chinese architecture is self-evident." ”
Inspired by Wang Jun, Wang Nan called this set of compositional proportions "the sum ratio of heaven and earth". At the end of 2018, "Rules, Circles, Sums of Heaven and Earth: A Study on the Composition and Proportions of Ancient Chinese Capitals, Architectural Ensembles and Individual Buildings" (hereinafter referred to as "Proportional Research") was published. The book says: The composition scale based on square and circle drawings, which was widely used by ancient Chinese craftsmen, contains the cosmology of the ancient Chinese "heaven and round place" and the cultural concept of pursuing harmony between heaven and earth, which can be described as an important tradition in ancient Chinese urban planning and architectural design.
The book includes more than 400 examples, which are geographically distributed in 20 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, including Beijing, Hebei and Henan.
In terms of building types, it covers most of the types of ancient Chinese architecture. Wang Nan took the Han Dynasty as an example: the largest case, the ruins of Chang'an City in the Han Dynasty, with an area of 36 square kilometers within the city walls; The smallest case, the Xiaotang Mountain Tomb, was only a little taller than a person, and "the proportional techniques used were exactly the same."
In terms of time span, it runs from the Neolithic Age to the end of the Qing Dynasty. The three concentric circles of the Niuheliang mound are reproduced on the flat and cross-sectional surfaces of the Qianqiu Pavilion of the Forbidden City; The 1:2 height-to-width ratio of the east hall of Foguang Temple in the Tang Dynasty is exactly the same as the Taihe Gate of the Forbidden City rebuilt during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty.
"Consistently, consistently, consistently." Wang Nan repeated it three times.
Relay to decipher the "code book" of more than 90 years
"Look at these, it's all codebooks."
Standing in the bustling crowd of the Forbidden City, Wang Nan pointed to the Taihe Gate and the surrounding buildings. "You see houses that don't speak, but the secrets behind them are all hidden. It's our job to unlock and make them speak through research. ”
If we compare the silent millennium of ancient Chinese architecture to a day, let them speak, and it will only begin at the last hour.
The Proportional Study begins, "This study is a new discovery of an old topic. The so-called old topic refers to the study of ancient Chinese urban and architectural planning and design methods, especially the study of composition and proportion in planning and design. This research was initiated by the ancestors of the China Construction Society, and has almost never stopped for more than 80 years. ”
At the beginning of the 20th century, the famous "Tree of Architecture" in the History of Comparative Architecture, edited by the British scholar Fletcher, regarded Western architecture as the backbone and considered Chinese architecture to be just a "non-historical" secondary branch. Such prejudices are powerless to refute. Prior to this, China did not have its own architectural history, and architectural skills were mainly passed down by artisans. Chinese architecture suffers from "aphasia".
What are the basic laws of ancient Chinese architecture?
The Japanese architectural historian Tadashi Ito, who was the first to answer the question, asserted in "The History of Architectural Affairs in China": "It is more appropriate for the Japanese to study the vast part of China, both in art and in history." This situation was broken by the establishment of the China Construction Society in 1930 and the rush of Liang Sicheng, Liu Dunzhen, Lin Huiyin and other colleagues of the Society. At the juncture of the survival of the country and the nation, they hope to scientifically and systematically explain the unique value of Chinese architecture as a "special part of my art and thought".
The study of compositional proportions is one of the main threads. Lin Huiyin once talked about the importance of the trade-off of architectural proportions: "As for the beauty of architecture, what is shallow and easy to see is, of course, its outline, color, material, etc., but most of the spirit of beauty lies in its trade-off; The ratio of length and shortness, the distribution of the size of the parts on the plane, the weight of each volume and the weight of each part on the three-dimensional level, the so-called increase of one point is too long, minus one point is too short. ”
Opened the "code book" that has been deciphered for more than 90 years: Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin's discovery of the "modular system" of Song-style and Qing-style buildings preliminarily established the method of proportional trade-off of single buildings; Architect Chen Mingda conducted a comprehensive analysis of the composition scale and design methods of a single building, opening up a new style of research. Scholars such as Fu Xinian and Wang Qiheng further discovered that not only individual buildings, but also the external spaces of building complexes, including gardens and cities, are planned and designed using modular grids......
"The ancients used timber and square grids as units of measurement. How is this unit designed? What is the number? Wang Guixiang, Wang Nan and other scholars have answered this question in their research on proportion. Wang Jun, who has long studied ancient Chinese planning and court systems, explained, "Such a design method and the cultural concepts it represents, which has been forgotten for more than 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, have been brought back by generations of scholars." ”
"It really takes several generations to get an outcome." Wang Guixiang said.
A few years ago, Wang Nan changed the name of his study from "Yixiangzhai" to "Zhizheng Zhai", which he said was a division of his academic research - from qualitative to quantitative. "The place of numbers in Chinese civilization may really be seriously underestimated. We have long lacked an understanding of the close relationship between mathematics, beauty and construction in Chinese architecture, and even mistakenly believed that ancient craftsmen worked in masks, and research has shown that ancient Chinese people had a long tradition of attaching importance to architectural proportions. ”
To some extent, the pursuit of this tradition can be seen as a mathematical proof of the beauty of ancient Chinese cities and architecture.
Just like the impact of a corner of Biyun Temple on Wang Nan, the famous American urban planner Edmund Edmund Brown. N. Bacon was also struck by the plans of the Ming and Qing dynasties for the city of Beijing. In his book Urban Design, the planner, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine, praised Beijing's planning and design as "flowing from one scale to another": "The planning of the ancient city of Beijing is probably the only one that can be enlarged from one scale to another, and any scale can stand on its own in terms of overall design." ”
Turning to the analysis of the city of Beijing in "A Study of Proportions", pointing to the nested circles and squares one after another, Wang Nan said, "From the city to the building complex to the building, the repeated use of the same set of square and circle proportions reveals the root of Bacon's feelings to a considerable extent." ”
Not only that, but he also found that there was a proportional relationship between religious buildings and the statues and murals in them. "The harmony you feel in the ancient Chinese space is all-encompassing, even the statues, murals and even utensils inside, everything is working together. Just like music, the scale is combined with rhythm and rhyme, and the overall sense of harmony flows. Wang Nan said that the upcoming Yingxian wooden tower paper is a comprehensive interpretation of this.
"The ratio of the classical Chinese to the golden ratio of the West is actually based on a certain gene of human beings, which is actually the common wisdom of human beings. Cui Kai, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief architect of China Architectural Design and Research Institute, said.
The device is used to carry the road
However, in Wang Nan's view, beauty may not be the "core content" of this ratio.
"In ancient times, it was a big deal to be able to build a house. Architecture is a kind of monument, and a civilization will engrave on it the things that matter most. Wang Nan believes that the proportions of square and circle drawings are the cosmology "engraved" in the architecture of an agrarian nation.
"We can think that 'the sky is round and the place is the universe model that the ancients thought it was', and we can also think that the 'round heaven and the earth' is the method of the ancients to measure the heavens and the earth and observe the time." Wang Jun said.
He explained that mastering time is the premise of the development of agricultural civilization, and the ancient Chinese developed a set of methods for observing time and space—obtaining time through astronomical observations in a circle, and measuring the earth in a grid of moments. In this practice, the ancients formed a traditional idea about the spatial layout of squares and circles, and archaeological discoveries can be traced back to the round mounds and square mounds of the Hongshan cultural site in Niuheliang.
He believes that it may be understood from this perspective that "everything is circumvented and the circle is used, and the master craftsman makes the system and the rules are set". "Because if you can't read time and space, you can't produce agriculture, you can't do 'everything around you', and you can't step into the threshold of civilization. I think that's the most important meaning of 'round heaven', and it's the way it defines our civilization. ”
"The combination of square and circle is the union of heaven and earth, and the union of heaven and earth is the combination of yin and yang, 'the harmony of yin and yang and all things are born'. Before the emergence of writing, the knowledge system of visual timing that supported the agricultural civilization, and the philosophical thinking of the Chinese ancestors on the birth and nourishment of all things, were directly presented through such a schema, and the aesthetic proportions of the Chinese classics originated from this. He said.
Feng Shi pointed out that in recent years, archaeology has discovered another round mound of the Hongshan culture, and the ratio of the three circles presents a relationship of equal difference series. "Is there any other French style in ancient Chinese architecture besides the proportions involved in 'square circle drawing'?" He believes that the research can be further developed.
At present, Wang Nan has set his sights on the bronzes, trying to excavate the "hidden civilization code" in them. He found that classical proportions were not only found in ancient buildings and cities.
"These studies are all solving a common problem, that is, how the important knowledge system of the source of our civilization is presented in the artifacts, and how to 'carry the Tao with the instrument'." In Wang Nan's view, the study of these is not to prove that our civilization is superior to other civilizations, but to try to reveal that the ancient Chinese, or human beings, had such a cosmology. Although the concept of "the sky is round and the place is round" is long gone, the pursuit of harmony between man and nature and the universe is still the same theme.
Every time he made a new discovery, he had an impulse to bow to the ancients three times. "The ancient Chinese," he argues, "will only be more intelligent than we can currently imagine." ”
The relay of generations of scholars has slowly reproduced this wisdom. "The research of our predecessors has made the history of Chinese architecture unique among the world's architectural history. The scientific and systematic academic path that can be in dialogue with the world's architectural historiography has initially achieved the desired results. Wang Guixiang said.
The "Tree of Architecture" has long since been removed from the History of Comparative Architecture, and a few years ago, the editors of the History of Comparative Architecture approached Wang Guixiang to use a study of his work on Chinese architecture. "Chinese architectural thought is having more and more influence on the world."
In the summer of the year when the book was published, Wang Nan went to the University of Tokyo in Japan to give an academic presentation. After studying some of the most important pagodas in Japan, he found that the ratio of the total height of most pagodas to the height below the pagoda was the same. "This method of proportions has actually influenced Japan as well."
After listening to his report, Japanese architectural historian Keisuke Fujii responded that it is a pity that the Japanese academic community does not do much research in this area now, but the engineers who do maintenance and protection pay more attention to these, and Japanese scholars should also pick up this research again.
"The Chinese have come to study theirs," Wang Nan felt, prompting Japanese scholars to "re-examine themselves."
"In the past, we had to try to prove that we have our own architectural history and our own proportions of classical architecture, but now this may not be the case. The West has a classic ratio represented by the golden ratio, is this set of classic proportions from the Neolithic Age to modern times, from urban planning to individual buildings can be used consistently? Is there also a cosmology and cultural connotation that has been passed down through the ages? Now, these questions are thrown back to Western scholars. Wang Nan said.
A new generation of rules
In March 2024, more than halfway through the course of the "Three Mountains and Five Gardens Garden Art Inheritance and Digital Regeneration High-level Talent Training Project", Yan Yu, the project leader and tenured associate professor of Beijing Institute of Technology, assigned an assignment to the students: to design a garden on a site of 42 meters × 30 meters, that is, a similar aspect ratio.
He explains the purpose of the assignment as follows: "To guide the students to explore the application in the design and become a kind of consciousness." ”
How to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity is a question that the architectural historian has been pondering for a long time: after many years of teaching architectural design and architecture, he chose to return to school to study the history of Chinese architecture.
"We studied architecture in school and engaged in architectural design in design institutes, and we continued the architecture system established in the West. When we do architectural design, we will scrutinize the proportions, consciously use the golden ratio, and we will also scrutinize the Parthenon. But we didn't analyze our Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven. We didn't know that China itself had a set of codes. This research has established confidence for us to build the confidence of Chinese architectural culture and the construction of Chinese architectural system today. Yan Yu said.
Zhuang Weimin, then dean of the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, mentioned a similar topic at an academic seminar on "Proportional Studies": "Many of our students, including young and middle-aged architects, are also 'arming' themselves with Chinese architecture, but their 'arming' is actually a symbolic thing, that is, trying to bring some elements of Chinese tradition, but not really grasping the essence of it." ”
At this seminar, a sentence by Li Jie, the compiler of "Constructing the French Style" more than 900 years ago, was repeatedly mentioned: "If you don't have the knowledge of governing the three palaces, how can you make the rules of the new generation?" ”
Today, when the "essence of governing the three palaces" continues to reappear, many people also feel the urgency of letting "wisdom" go out - the public evaluation of "one side of a thousand cities", "lack of Chinese characteristics" and "wonderful architecture" highlights the dilemma faced by modern Chinese architecture.
"Can we build on the historiography of architecture to 'set the rules of the new generation'? This is an unavoidable issue. Wang Nan said bluntly, "Some people think that in order to innovate, they must abandon tradition, and some designers disdain to be bound by some rules, feeling that this affects their creativity." ”
This question was answered 80 years ago. In 1944, before the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the Transactions of China Construction Society resumed publication after a seven-year suspension.
"There is no doubt that in the future, China will adopt a large number of modern Western building materials and technologies...... How to accept the new scientific material methods and still be able to express China's unique style and significance, and how to send out new branches from old trees is really a problem. "Knowing oneself and knowing one's opponent, reviewing the past and learning the new, the architects who have science and technology have increased their knowledge and interest in their own country, and their creative power will naturally become strong unconsciously, which is the greatest significance of studying Chinese architecture."
"The classics of the ancients are the product of the great waves and sands, and if you do it according to the law of beauty, you will not go wrong in the first place." Wang Nan believes that on this basis, formulating new "rules" for contemporary cities and architecture will not only not restrict innovation, but will become the basis for free creation.
"Will we be able to use this method in the design of some buildings in the future?" At the seminar, Cui asked asked.
"This should be a very important curriculum for architectural education in China," he suggested. Only in this way can students, whether they are very smart or talented, be able to clearly recognize and even master this method. In this way, the formal beauty and overall aesthetic level of Chinese architecture can be greatly improved. ”
At his suggestion, the word "regeneration" was deliberately used in the name of the "Three Mountains and Five Gardens Garden Art Inheritance and Digital Regeneration High-level Talent Training Project".
"The so-called regeneration is not a simple copy of the form, but a kind of gene inheritance."
After the assignment, the teacher told the young students: "The cultural and artistic genes at the core of Chinese architecture are unchanged and should be discovered and inherited. In the end, as Mr. Liang Sicheng said, we have the power to create our own buildings. ”