A woman who combines oriental elegance with western freedom puts her thin body in front of a large painting table, writing and drawing non-stop.
She is Lin Huiyin, the first female architect in mainland China.
From not being allowed to graduate with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, to joining the China Construction Society with Liang Sicheng after returning to China, she braved the flames and dangers of war to protect ancient Chinese architecture, and insisted on completing the design of the national emblem and the monument to the people's heroes on her bed in her later years......
In his short life of 51 years, Lin Huiyin devoted most of his life to China's architectural career.
With her thin body, she built the theoretical framework of the early stage of Chinese architecture, supported the protective cover for the research work of Chinese architecture during the war, and also fused the literary and artistic attainments of "a poetic Qianxun Waterfall" and her strong, tenacious, noble and tough personality into the carved beams and paintings of Chinese architecture.
In Babaoshan, Beijing, Liang Sicheng, the "father of modern Chinese architecture" and her husband who accompanied Lin Huiyin for most of his life, personally designed a tombstone for his wife, which reads: Tomb of architect Lin Huiyin.
In the summer of 1924, on the campus of Penn, Lin Huiyin always wore light-colored Chinese tops and dark long skirts, and was active in classes and social activities.
"She has as many seekers as a carp crossing the river", but her studies are the most important part of her heart, and she can always stand out in the homework evaluation.
However, when Lin Huiyin was at Penn, she was restricted from enrolling in the Department of Architecture because of her female status.
The reason for this is undoubtedly nonsense today – architecture students need to draw at night, and "it is very inappropriate for a girl to stay in the studio late at night".
Lin Huiyin's photo at the University of Pennsylvania
This gender restriction was common at that time. Physicist Chien-shiung Wu went to the United States in 1936 for further study, but was persuaded to quit by the University of Michigan due to the rule that "women are not allowed to enter the student union", and finally switched to the University of California.
But at that time, Lin Huiyin was alone. She was restricted by the unreasonable regulations of the institution, not by the knowledge of architecture.
Although architecture is static, the knowledge presented by wood, stone, beam and column is fluid, and what is more important than knowledge is a scientific worldview and methodology for looking at architecture.
With his love for architecture, Lin Huiyin chose to enroll in the Department of Fine Arts and take courses in the Department of Architecture at the same time.
By the time he graduated, Lin had earned 61 credits in architecture — which, according to Zhongjie Lin, now an associate professor at Penn's Weitzman School of Design, "is proof enough to be on par with the best students in the architecture department."
In 2022, "Made in China: A Century of Modern Architecture Dialogue" was held at Penn. When a group of architectural scholars reviewed the overseas study path of these modern Chinese architects, they found that "except for a few students who dropped out, Lin Huiyin was the only one among them who did not get a degree in architecture."
To correct this error, on October 15, 2023, the official website of the Weitzman School of Design in the United States published an article that will award Lin Huiyin, the most famous female architect in modern China, with a belated bachelor's degree in architecture at the graduation ceremony on May 18, 2024.
This graduation ceremony is 100 years late.
Fritz Steiner, director of Penn's Weizman School of Design, said that "this is a historical mistake," and that the starting point of the mistake lies in Lin's female identity. This gender prejudice was finally corrected on the 120th anniversary of Lin Huiyin's birth.
On February 12, 1927, at the graduation ceremony of Pennsylvania University, the article gave special explanations to Lin Huiyin, Chen Zhi and Liang Sicheng
But for a long time, the appearance and temperament of this talented woman, her poems such as "You Are the April Day of the World", as well as her identity as a writer, and even the rumors of her relationship with Liang Sicheng, Xu Zhimo, Jin Yuelin and other masters of the Republic of China, are more well-known than her as the first female architect in China and her contribution to Chinese architectural scholarship.
This kind of superficial attention to appearance, Lin Huiyin, who has a straightforward personality, is very disgusted.
My friend Jin Yuelin once recorded an anecdote in which he praised Lin Hui for being a "beauty under the forest", but was scolded by her: "What beauty is not beautiful, as if a woman has nothing to do, as if she is only worthy of decoration!"
Of course, there are many, many more things for women to do. For Lin Huiyin, literature is just a hobby, and the career of an architect is "a sacred cause" that she loves and dedicates all her life.
Lin Hui's love and knowledge of architecture began with a trip to Europe with his father Lin Changmin.
In 1920, Lin Changmin, who had resigned from his post as Attorney General, was sent to Europe as a member of the "League of Nations China Association". When Lin Changmin went out on business, Lin Huiyin always went out sketching with his landlady who was an architect.
In "April Day in the World", Lin Huiyin played by Zhou Xun
Architecture is not just a house or a building, but a "frozen music" and "an epic of stone", "a discipline that includes art and engineering". Lin Huiyin's passion for architecture directly influenced Liang Sicheng, who "didn't even know what architecture was at that time" after returning to China.
In early June 1924, the two crossed the ocean to study at the University of Pennsylvania.
Although there was Lin Huiyin's longing for knowledge on the American continent at that time, what she cared about was always the ancient buildings that had stood on the land of China for a long time, as well as the mountains and rivers of her family and country that were suffering.
In an interview with a local media outlet, Lin Huiyin said:
"We are saddened to see that our native and peculiar art is being stripped away by that brutal fanaticism of 'keeping pace with the world'. She even went so far as to say, "Dutch bricklayers and British plumbers are hurting China's cities." ”
A strong ambition to preserve and protect ancient Chinese architecture, "an architectural theory that can make buildings immortal for hundreds of years", has taken deep root in the heart of Lin Huiyin, a wanderer, and has become her cause of running and crying.
In 2018, the exhibition "Awakening Modernity: The First Generation of Chinese Architects Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania" was opened to the public. Tong Ming, the curator and professor at Tongji University, believes that "how to define and develop Chinese architecture" was the mission faced by Lin Huiyin and others at that time.
Studying at Penn was not a time for the two young people to escape from the world. Hu Shi came to visit when he was studying in the United States, and he found that Lin Hui was much more stable because of his old age. The reason is that the two big families of the Liang family and the Lin family are in the midst of internal and external troubles.
In the first two years of studying at Penn, the bad news of the Liang family and the Lin family came one after another, shocking two young people who were studying abroad.
Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin when they studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States
Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng had just arrived at Penn for more than a month, and Liang's mother, Li Huixian, died of breast cancer. In December of the following year, Lin Changmin, as the deputy chief of staff of the Third Army of the Northeast Army, was ambushed by Zhang Xueliang's Feng army in the battle against Zhang Zuolin's warlords and was killed by a stray bullet.
After the death of Liang's mother and Lin's father one after another, Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng's idea of studying was strongly shaken. Supporting the two young people is Liang Qichao.
Liang Qichao wrote to Liang Sicheng, "She knows my relationship with Uncle Lin, Uncle Lin's daughter is my daughter, not to mention the relationship between the two of you." From now on, I will treat her the same as Sizhuang (Liang Qichao's second daughter)", and told Liang Sicheng to encourage Lin Huiyin: "You must muster up the courage, give full play to her genius, complete her studies, and work with you in the future to make a contribution to the Chinese art world." ”
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Liang Qichao brought the two young people "Building the French Style" written by the Song Dynasty architect Li Jie. This ancient book later became a compass-like existence in Lin and Liang's architectural life.
A few months later, in March 1926, Liang Qichao was admitted to Union Hospital due to uremia, but was misdiagnosed and mistakenly cut off his healthy right kidney on the operating table.
It cannot be ignored that whether it is Liang Qichao or Lin Changmin, these two revolutionaries have important guidance for Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin's architectural life. In their architectural careers, the two young people inherited their fathers' feelings for their family and country and their humanistic conscience.
The grand narrative of the Lin family's loyalty and martyrdom and the three academicians of the Liang family is another period of modern Chinese intellectuals' struggle for knowledge, truth, and peace.
In 1927, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin held a wedding in Ottawa, and the wedding date was March 21, which is the date on the inscription on the inscription of Li Jieli, who wrote "Building the French Style".
Lin Hui was reluctant to wear Western white yarn to get married, and Ottawa had nowhere to find a set of oriental phoenix crowns.
She decided to design a wedding dress for herself that combines Chinese and Western cultures, "with a headscarf wrapped around her head and beaded headscarves, and two colored satins hanging from the left and right, which can be regarded as a crown and a veil." The neckline and cuffs are all matched with wide stripes of colored edges, which is more festive than a plain white Western-style wedding dress."
This set of wedding dresses that combines Chinese and Western styles is a metaphor for her future perspective of "observing Chinese architecture through the eyes of today's Western architecture and aesthetics".
Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin held a wedding in Ottawa
After the wedding, the two returned to China through Europe, and first went to Northeastern University to start the establishment of the Department of Architecture under the paving of Liang Qichao. Later, due to the death of Liang Qichao, the Liang family's mansion was in the wind and rain, as the eldest son and eldest daughter-in-law, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin returned to Beiping, where they had been separated for five years, to support the shaky family, and in a short period of time, they returned to the cause of architecture.
The six years before the outbreak of the "77 Incident" in 1931 to 1937 were one of the few peaceful and fulfilling days in Lin Huiyin's life that was not entangled by stubborn diseases and not scorched by war, and she made many poems, essays, novels and other literary works that have been handed down to this day.
Compared with the interaction with Xu Zhimo and other literati of the "New Moon" magazine, for the architect Lin Huiyin, the research work of Chinese architecture of the Construction Institute is the focus of her life in Beiping.
In 1931, she and Liang Sicheng joined the "China Construction Society" and served as the director of the "School Management" and "French Department" respectively, becoming the first scholars in China to make a theoretical interpretation of traditional Chinese architecture. Everyone traveled to the four provinces of mountains and rivers (Shanxi, Shandong, Henan, Hebei) and other places to see the ancient capital and ancient buildings.
Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng's architectural ideas originated here.
In February 1932, Lin Huiyin published an article entitled "On Several Characteristics of Chinese Architecture" in the third volume of the Transactions of China Construction Society, using the principle of "practicality, solidity, and beauty" to analyze Chinese architecture.
In 1934, in the introduction to Liang Sicheng's "Qing Style Construction Rules", Lin Huiyin's architectural theory was further systematized.
With the help of "contemporaneous 'Western architectural and aesthetic perspectives'", she proposed the basic characteristics of the timber frame structure system of Chinese architecture by "structural method" and "plane layout", and made a clear distinction between Chinese architecture and Western classical architecture built with bricks and stones.
In "April Day in the World", Lin Huiyin played by Zhou Xun
Both of these articles provided innovative points for a series of theoretical formulations by Liang Sicheng later. Liang Congjie later recalled his parents' academic career, and he remembered that his father said, "Most of the 'eyes' in his articles were 'pointed' by his mother."
Lin Huiyin's vision is broad, and her investigation and understanding of architecture are not limited to the logic of architecture. In addition to the perspective of Western architecture, as a writer, she also has a pair of eyes to discover beauty and a brain to think about aesthetic logic.
She believes that compared to the rigid masonry buildings of the West, Chinese wood-frame buildings have "the habit of exposing all structural parts without flinching".
Lin Huiyin boldly put anthropomorphism in the field of literature into the theoretical discourse of architecture. Xia Zhujiu commented: "Lin Huiyin's architectural history writing, the words are moving, which makes a kind of technical writing, but also full of enthusiasm, with affectionate sentences and affirmative tones, to inspire readers' feelings. ”
This discourse demonstrates her erudition and talent, and also represents "her study of Chinese architecture from the realm of technology and engineering to the realm of ethics and philosophical ontology".
With Lin Huiyin's innovative discoveries, "we can identify Lin Huiyin as the founder and pioneer of Chinese architectural history and theory."
At the time of writing On the Characteristics of Chinese Architecture, Lin Hui was pregnant, and was always unwell from pregnancy reactions, "often leaving his desk and drawing board with a pale face", while also taking care of the large number of people in the extended family and taking care of household chores. This put a heavy burden on Lin Huiyin's body, which was already weak due to tuberculosis.
Lin Huiyin once wrote to a friend to vent his dissatisfaction with chores:
"Whenever I do some chores, I always feel that I am leaving out some people who are unknown but more interesting and important. So, I hurried to finish the work at hand so that I could 'talk' with them. ”
The façade and section of the east hall of Foguang Temple
In the eyes of her son, Liang Congjie, his mother "doesn't like to do housework", "these trivial things make her feel that she has wasted her precious life, and delayed something that should be done that is more valuable to others and readers".
But Lin Hui's passion for architecture could not be consumed by the family work. In 1933, when her health improved, she embarked on a long journey with Liang Sicheng to investigate ancient buildings.
In the past five years, Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng set foot in Beiping, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Zhejiang and other provinces and cities, and measured and mapped the Yungang Grottoes in Shanxi, Zhengding Longxing Temple in Hebei and other ancient temples and pavilions.
Lin Huiyin at Foguang Temple Image source: Visual China
In 1937, Lin Huiyin, Liang Sicheng and other colleagues of the Construction Society, after two days of climbing over the hills, finally saw the quiet and solemn Foguang Temple at dusk in early summer.
A photo records Lin Huiyin's work status at that time. Dressed in dark pants, she stretched out her left foot on a ladder below, stepped on a wooden ladder with her right foot, kept her center of gravity stable, stretched out her hands, left hand on top, right hand down, and measured the height of the prayer building of Foguang Temple.
As she walked into the interior of the mysterious temple, a black mass flew towards her. It's swarms of bats that fan the dust off the beams and smell of bed bugs. This is the daily routine of architectural inspections.
In this harsh environment, Lin Huiyin saw from afar the carving of "Female Disciple Ning Gongyu" under the beams of the Buddhist temple - this was a temple donated by Mrs. Ning Gongyu and the women called "Empress Wu" by the monks at that time.
With these texts, the history of Foguang Temple can be traced back to the eleventh year of the Tang Dynasty, that is, in 857 AD.
Under the girders of the Buddhist temple is carved the words "Female Disciple Ning Gongyu".
This is an exciting discovery in the history of Chinese architecture. Foguang Temple was "the only Tang Dynasty wooden structure encountered by Lin Huiyin and others during their years of searching", 127 years earlier than the oldest wooden structure found in China at that time.
This broke the assertion of the Japanese scholar Tadashi Ito at the time that "there are no Tang Dynasty wooden buildings in China, only Kyoto and Nara in Japan", and it was undoubtedly a discovery that could inspire the people when the Japanese army was approaching North China at that time.
A few days after the discovery of Foguang Temple, at the Lugou Bridge, the Japanese commander pressed the button for a full-scale invasion of China.
At the same time, Liang Sicheng received an invitation from Japan's "East Asia Co-Prosperity Association", the purpose of which was self-evident.
Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng immediately refused, and reluctantly gave up the items given by their father's friends, only took a few suitcases and two cover rolls, and dragged their families along the movements of Chinese intellectuals, went south to Yantai, and then to Zhengzhou, all the way to the southwest.
Along the way, thousands of original materials of the two before the war were investigating ancient buildings at the Construction Society, "but they hugged them tightly to their chests, and none of them were lost." After a stopover in Kunming, they finally settled in the small village of Lizhuang in Yibin. By this time, it was 1940, and the Japanese army had gone all the way south to Hong Kong.
In Lizhuang, Lin Hui was bedridden due to a tuberculosis attack, and Liang Sicheng's early spine soft tissue gray matter left by a car accident became more and more serious.
In the second year of settling in Lizhuang, bad news came from the front line, Lin Huiyin's third brother Lin Heng died in an air battle against Japan in the sky over Chengdu. This may have been Lin Huiyin's "most emotionally depressed period".
The country is broken by mountains and rivers, and the city is deep in spring. Liang Zaibing and Liang Congjie both remember that when they were in Lizhuang, their mother Lin Huiyin liked to read the poems of Du Fu and Lu You, "especially the poems written by Du Fu during the war years."
"Besides, I have fallen into the dust, and I have returned to the glory. After going to the thatched hut, his wife was dressed in knots. The weeping pine voice returned, and the sad spring was swallowed. ”
"Poor little children, I haven't remembered Chang'an. ”
The traditional Chinese literati style and discipline supported them through the difficult years of the Anti-Japanese War.
Poor and strong, Liang Sicheng described his wife as follows: "In recent years, although she has been seriously ill, she has retained her natural agility and perseverance, and she owes much credit to the maintenance of the academic spirit and morale of the Society during the difficult days of wartime." ”
Source: Visual China
Relying on a desk built of a few pieces of wood, a noisy typewriter, a vase that supported Liang Sicheng's chin to relieve spinal pain, a marching bed where Lin Hui's body was sick, and various documents, classics and other materials, they wrote the "History of Chinese Architecture" belonging to the Chinese, and wrote and drew the "Image History of Chinese Architecture" in English, building a way for the research results of the first generation of Chinese architects to go to the world.
On the eve of the founding of New China, Lin Hui participated in the design of the national emblem and then participated in the design of the monument to the people's heroes.
In the early morning of April 1, 1955, she slept quietly on that April day on earth.
作者：黄茗婷。 来源：南风窗（ID：SouthReviews）。
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