Liang Sicheng

Liang Sicheng (Chinese梁思成, Pinyin Liang Sicheng; * April 20, 1901; † January 9, 1972 ) was a Chinese architect, construction and architectural historians, preservationists and trainers. He was careful to Chinese traditional buildings and therefore, these get through conservation and to enable their care. He was a member of the Academy Akademia Sinica, Member of the Committee of Philosophy and Social Sciences Department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the son of Liang Qichao, the scholar and reformer of the end times of the Chinese Empire.

He and his wife Lin Huiyin worked together in scientific research of Chinese architecture.

Life and work

In 1945, Liang was chairman of the Faculty of Architecture at Tsinghua University. In 1946 he was a visiting professor at Yale University, and he received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. He was also nominated as the representative of China to the advisory committee for the construction of the UN headquarters in New York. At that time, he worked with Le Corbusier and other world- renowned architect.

Liang Sicheng ideas are influential to this day. This concerns on the one hand his research on Chinese Architectural History, on the other hand his ideas in relation to the (now now spread worldwide ) urban development concepts of megacities. Liang thematized in 1949, the problem of generating traffic, especially in commuter traffic and supply, resulting from urban development concepts, which are based on displacement of city dwellers from the city center to the periphery. In particular, he turned in the 1950s, together with Chen Zhanxiang and some other experts against the idea of ​​settling the administrative center of Beijing in the old town near the Tienanmen.

Liang entered in favor of preserving the historic Old Town and the city walls of Beijing, and for a new administrative center in the west of the old town. But this idea of ​​a polycentric structure of the Chinese capital did not sit through to the preferred of the Russian advisers and the Chinese political leadership monocentric conception.

During the Cultural Revolution, he was exposed to public humiliation, his house was ransacked and he was forced along with his family to move into a small room. In 2012 his house was demolished in one of the traditional Hutonggassen in Beijing's downtown district Dengcheng accidentally. A reconstruction was provided, however, according to press reports.