Zhuang Jun and Modern Chinese Architecture
庄俊和中国近代建筑
By Xue Qiuli (薛求理)
【Editor’s Note: Shanghai's architectural evolution in the 20th century mirrored its cosmopolitan ambitions, with landmarks like the Bund and Jincheng Bank symbolizing the era’s grandeur. The Sassoon Building, completed in 1928, epitomized Art Deco, while Jincheng Bank’s Neoclassical Revival design showcased Chinese ingenuity under architect Zhuang Jun, a University of Illinois graduate. Zhuang’s career bridged global techniques and local craftsmanship, leaving a legacy through iconic bank buildings and institutional projects. His style transitioned from ornate Neoclassical to streamlined modernism, exemplified by the Administration Building at Shanghai Jiaotong University and a maternity hospital. A founder of the Society of Chinese Architects, Zhuang sought to elevate Chinese talent against foreign dominance. Despite a wartime hiatus, his contributions to state-run design agencies and his English–Chinese lexicon underscored his commitment to national progress. Living to 100, Zhuang witnessed Shanghai’s transformation, his creations enduring as cultural landmarks and testaments to his pioneering vision.】
Twentieth-Century Shanghai Construction
In the 1920s, Shanghai’s urban development surged forward at a breathtaking pace, and the more than twenty foreign firm buildings along the Bund (外滩) took shape—essentially the Bund façade we see today. In 1928, the Sassoon Building (沙逊大厦), designed by Palmer and Turner (公和洋行) and now known as the Peace Hotel (和平饭店), was completed. Its Art Deco style distinguishes it from its neighbors; in fact, half the buildings along the Bund were designed by Palmer and Turner, a firm active in both Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Also in 1928, just two blocks away on Jiangxi Middle Road (formerly known as “Shanghai Bank Street”), the Jincheng Bank (金城银行) building—founded by the Chinese national capital—was finished. Across the street stood the Gongbuju Building (工部局大楼), erected a decade earlier. Jincheng Bank’s façade was as expansive as the HSBC building on the Bund. The design adhered to typical Neoclassical Revival principles, with a tripartite horizontal division and five vertical bays on the main elevation. The entryway was originally just a single opening, yet supported by two Doric (多立克) columns. The building rose to about six stories, connected on the first and second floors by two symmetrical staircases. Its primary focus lay on the second floor (called “1F” in British terminology), where the banking hall stood. Four tall columns soared toward a gilded coffered ceiling with elegant marble balustrades and wall panels. Even a century later, ascending the grand staircase to the second floor leaves one with a sense of awe.
Shanghai Jincheng Bank Façade (上海金城银行沿街立面)
Shanghai Jincheng Bank Banking Hall (now Bank of Communications) (上海金城银行营业厅（现为交通银行）)
Architect Zhuang Jun (建筑师庄俊)
The Jincheng Bank in Shanghai on Jiangxi Middle Road—now the Bank of Communications (交通银行)—was designed by the Chinese architect Zhuang Jun (庄俊) (1888–1990). Born in Shanghai during the Guangxu era of the Qing Dynasty, he first attended a private tutorial school, later enrolling at Nanyang Model High School (南洋模范中学). In 1909, he entered Tangshan College of Road and Mines (唐山路矿学院, predecessor of Tangshan Jiaotong University). After a year of study, he took the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship exam and, placing 77th among more than a hundred successful candidates, went abroad in 1910 to the University of Illinois, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering in 1914. His program combined civil engineering and architectural design, providing a comprehensive education in structural design.
When Zhuang Jun left for the United States, it was the twilight of the Qing Dynasty; by the time he returned, China was under Republican rule. On his return, Tsinghua College was in the midst of large-scale construction, and he was hired as an architect and lecturer at Tsinghua’s Infrastructure Division, working alongside the New York-based architect Henry Murphy (墨菲, 1877–1954). Together, they designed the early Tsinghua campus buildings—among them the Auditorium, Library, Gymnasium, and Science Hall—while Zhuang Jun also taught architectural drafting. After a decade at Tsinghua, he was sent by the university to Columbia University (哥伦比亚大学) in 1924 for further study, escorting a group of Tsinghua students to the United States. When his studies concluded, Zhuang Jun traveled throughout Europe before ultimately returning to his hometown of Shanghai.
In 1925, Zhuang Jun established his own architectural firm in Shanghai—among the earliest such practices founded by a Chinese architect. Many of his former classmates worked in banking upon their return from the United States, enabling him to cultivate relationships with numerous bankers. His firm’s first major commissions were indeed bank buildings: the Jincheng Banks in Shanghai and Hankou, as well as the Bank of Communications in Harbin, Dalian, Xuzhou, Jinan, and Qingdao.
The Jincheng Bank in Hankou (now the Wuhan Art Museum, 武汉美术馆) was completed in 1931. Its façade featured eighteen Corinthian columns spanning three floors; patrons ascended twenty-one steps through the main entrance to the second-floor banking hall. On either side of the colonnaded center rose office wings, fitted with tall, narrow windows for practical use. The Qingdao branch of the Bank of Communications (交通银行), built in 1932, employed a similar method but on a smaller scale, displaying just three central bays with four Corinthian columns. To accentuate those columns, the architect placed pilasters along the outer frame, leaving them slightly separate from the central columns and forming a single bay at each extremity. This grand, recessed colonnade generated a dramatic interplay of light and shadow, visually distinguishing the key features from the solid wall surfaces.
Throughout the 1930s, China’s banks—both Chinese and foreign—proliferated during a phase of economic development and fierce competition. They favored Neoclassical Revival styles: imposing stone columns, marble floors and walls, and ornate balustrades to symbolize the wealth and stability of banking institutions. Prior to 1920, such Neoclassical Revival methods prevailed in official, religious, and commercial buildings across Europe and America. What Zhuang Jun had learned abroad found ample use at home, and commissions poured in. Examining these bank exteriors reveals meticulous Corinthian capitals, with fluting or slight entasis in the columns. Early twentieth-century Chinese construction companies showed remarkable skill in crafting these Western-style buildings. Zhuang Jun maintained strong working relationships with these local builders; thanks to supportive clients, the architect’s creative brilliance, and superb construction teams, modern Chinese architecture was enriched by these enduring works.
In 1932, Zhuang Jun designed the Main Administration Building at Shanghai Jiaotong University (上海交通大学). It adjoins an already-finished gymnasium, with the ground floor forming a pedestal in harmony with the gym’s height, clad in rusticated stone. The top two floors are faced in red brick, while the windows for those upper levels are encased in elongated arches. The roof features a subtle slope. Zhuang Jun fused Eastern and Western elements, leaning heavily toward Western aesthetics. His Neoclassical buildings tended to be stately, composed, and substantial—traits that echoed his own bearing.
A Transition in Architectural Style
By the time he designed the Administration Building, Zhuang Jun had streamlined some of the Classical approaches he once applied to bank buildings, reserving ornamentation for the entrance canopy and the round windows above it while shifting from stone facades to brick surfaces elsewhere. His work on Dr. Sun Keji’s Maternity Hospital marked a further step toward modernist architecture. Dr. Sun Keji was a renowned obstetrician who studied in the United States, serving as chief resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital before returning to China. He opened his maternity hospital on Daxi Road (大西路, today’s Yan’an West Road near Jiangsu Road) in Shanghai and commissioned Zhuang Jun to design it.
That design, symmetrical in plan, placed the main entrance at the center facing Daxi Road. The lobby contained a central staircase and elevator. Consultation, examination, laboratory, and pharmacy rooms occupied the east side of the ground floor, while the kitchen, boiler room, laundry facilities, staff offices, and dining areas were located on the west. The second and third floors housed patient rooms with corresponding nurses’ stations and serving rooms. On the fourth floor, the west side also contained patient rooms, while the east side included spaces for sterilization, anesthesia, surgery, maternity, nurseries, and wet nurse accommodations. The fifth and sixth floors held a library, water tanks, and mechanical rooms, with an accessible rooftop terrace.
For this hospital, Zhuang Jun abandoned his Classical techniques entirely. The ground floor used stone blocks for the base, while upstairs levels featured horizontal lines of windows and darker spandrel panels, offering ample light for maternity patients to see outdoors. The stair and elevator core rose prominently, reflected in the window arrangement. Part of this stylistic shift was influenced by a new member of the firm, Huang Yaowei, another architect with American training.
Between 1925 and 1938—a span of thirteen years—Zhuang Jun designed more than a dozen buildings, including banks, offices, and clinics, evolving from Neoclassical Revival to modern architecture. In 1927, he initiated the founding of the Society of Chinese Architects (中国建筑师学会), hoping to unite Chinese architects and break foreign firms’ market monopoly. In the society’s bulletin, he penned a foreword advocating the inclusive adoption of both historical and global design methods.
A Pause in Creative Work
Zhuang Jun’s architectural practice ceased in 1938 with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, by which time he was fifty years old. Over the subsequent five decades, he completed no new projects. During Shanghai’s occupation, he taught evening classes at Datong University and Zhijiang University. In October 1949, he was invited by the new government in Beijing to assist in China’s reconstruction, so he closed his firm, bringing more than fifty professionals with him to the north. At sixty-one, he became chief engineer of China’s first state-run architectural design agency—the North China Construction and Engineering Company under the Ministry of Communications. In early 1953, the central government created the Ministry of Construction Engineering, reorganizing that company into the Central Architectural Design Institute (later the Beijing Industrial Architectural Design Institute), where Zhuang Jun again served as chief engineer. In 1954, owing to age and frailty, he returned to Shanghai to recuperate, transferring to the East China Industrial Architectural Design Institute until his retirement in July 1958 at the age of seventy. After retiring, he compiled the English–Chinese Lexicon of Architectural Engineering (英汉建筑工程名词), published in 1962, filling an academic void at the time.
A Heart Devoted to China (拳拳爱国之心)
In 1985, I completed my master’s degree and reported to the Shanghai Urban Construction College, where the architecture department was led by Zhuang Taosheng (庄涛声, 1923–2004). Everyone naturally mentioned his renowned father, Zhuang Jun (庄俊), recognized as China’s first student of architecture to study in the United States, the first Chinese architect to open his own firm, and the first chief engineer of a government-run design institute. Affable and caring, Zhuang Taosheng was like a father figure to us younger colleagues. As I grew acquainted with him, I visited his home and learned about his life’s journey.
Born in 1923 in Beijing, Zhuang Taosheng graduated from Zhijiang University’s architecture department in 1944 and initially worked in his father’s firm. In 1946, he went to the U.S., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Miami after one year, followed by a position with a New York-based firm. In 1949, he received his master’s from the University of Illinois and continued working in the same company. By then, the People’s Republic of China had been founded. Alvin Inman, the firm’s owner, invited Zhuang Jun to join him in the United States, suggesting a rename to “Inman–Zhuang.” Zhuang Jun politely declined and left Shanghai for Beijing to serve the new government, urging his son to return home soon to contribute to the nation’s rebuilding.
In 1950, Zhuang Taosheng left his position in the U.S. and returned to China. His father did not wish him to rely on familial influence in Beijing or Shanghai, so he first went to teach at Northern Jiaotong University in Tangshan, later moving to Tianjin University in 1952 to head the industrial building research group. In 1959, he relocated his entire family to Zhengzhou, founding the architecture department at Zhengzhou Engineering College, thus establishing a formal civil engineering and architectural education program in the populous central plains. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhuang Taosheng was accused of espionage for the U.S. and suffered public criticism, and his family was sent to the countryside in Henan Province for labor. In 1979, for the sake of his aging parents, he returned to Shanghai to help establish the new architecture program at the city’s Urban Construction College, founding departments in architecture, civil engineering, and construction management. Likely one of the best English speakers on campus, he was indispensable for hosting foreign visitors. When foreign experts lectured and left everyone else confused, his translations were exact and easily understood. He once showed me a manuscript for a book on “green architecture,” lamenting how difficult it was to get it published. Eventually, Green Architecture (绿色建筑) was published by Tongji University Press in 1995—one of China’s earlier works on sustainable design.
A Century of Life (人生百年)
Thanks to my connection with Zhuang Taosheng, I visited the Zhuang family residence multiple times between 1986 and 1988. Their home lay at the end of a lane off Fuxing Middle Road in Shanghai, only about twenty meters deep. They owned an entire three-floor unit plus an adjacent unit, purchased and remodeled in the 1930s. Entering the front door into a spacious parlor felt almost startling. Large sofas were set in a wide circle—if guests drew them closer for conversation, the arrangement looked uneven; if they left them apart, the distance felt too great. The residence included a skylit courtyard lush with plants. Having grown up in a traditional Shanghai shikumen house, I was silently amazed—this was indeed the “upper side” of Shanghai living.
Whenever I visited, Zhuang Taosheng’s wife and daughter, who both spoke with a lilting Beijing accent, greeted me warmly. By then, the elder Zhuang Jun was nearly a hundred years old and living upstairs. He rarely engaged with guests, though he kept a decades-long habit of riding a pedicab each morning along Nanjing Road and the Bund. He never read newspapers, insisting that this daily circuit sufficed to keep him informed of world affairs. If he came downstairs just as we arrived, one of his family members would place a small blanket over his lap to shield him from the wind while he nodded slightly toward us in greeting. Looking at this centenarian patriarch—square-faced, fine-skinned, lips pressed firmly—I could see how closely he resembled his younger portraits, as if intelligence and longevity were etched into his very features.
Above the parlor’s fireplace hung a large photograph of the Tsinghua Auditorium. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1914, Zhuang Jun had worked at Tsinghua University’s construction department, supervising the building process for that dome-roofed hall, which—though attributed to Henry Murphy—Zhuang Jun oversaw on a daily basis. Next to that photo was an ink portrait painted by Jiang Zhaohé (蒋兆和) in the 1940s, capturing Zhuang Jun’s countenance with effortless clarity. Zhuang Taosheng recalled watching the master painter start by sketching two eyes, gradually expanding downward as he stood by, then a student at Zhijiang University.
In 1987, possibly because Professor Zheng Shiling (郑时龄) of Tongji University mentioned this distinguished alumnus while abroad, the dean of the University of Illinois School of Architecture, Alan Forrester, traveled to Shanghai to present Zhuang Jun with an honorary certificate. The ceremony took place in the second-floor conference room of Tongji University’s Wenyuan Building. Though almost one hundred years old at the time, Zhuang Jun could not attend in person. Dean Forrester’s speech hailed Zhuang Jun’s remarkable steps into his “second century,” and Zhuang Taosheng accepted the certificate and gave remarks in his father’s place. That afternoon, fellow University of Illinois alumnus Wang Dingzeng, who had earned his master’s in 1938, spoke as well.
Living to a hundred, Zhuang Jun witnessed the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic, enduring wars, economic depressions, and myriad upheavals, only to see Shanghai’s transformation under the reforms and opening-up of the late twentieth century. Buildings he designed across Shanghai and beyond have become cultural landmarks, preserved as heritage sites. During his youth and middle age, Zhuang Jun advanced the field with pioneering architectural practice on Chinese soil. He left a legacy that continues to flourish like a forest of modern buildings, cultivated and nurtured by the many who followed in his footsteps.
An Honorary Certificate from the University of Illinois (1987) (1987年，美国伊利诺伊大学颁发给庄俊的奖状)
Some of the details about Mr. Zhuang Jun (庄俊) presented here come from my conversations with his son, Mr. Zhuang Taosheng (庄涛声), and from a 2018 visit to Mr. Zhuang Taosheng’s son, Mr. Zhuang Pu (庄朴). I am also indebted to Professor Hua Xiahong (华霞虹) at Tongji University for helping me consult archives related to Mr. Zhuang Jun’s work. Special thanks are due to Mr. Zhuang Pu, Professor Hua, and Professor Zhou Junyan (周君言), as well as Professors Lin Feng, Zhao Dongmei, and Gao Yizhuo, who provided photographs.
This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds.
Originally published in the December 2024 issue of Shu Cheng Magazine (书城杂志)
Kindly attribute the translation if referenced.