The lure of the Orient: Scharoun and Häring's East-West connections

Abstract

Among Hugo Häring's papers in the Häring archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin are the minutes of six meetings entitled Discussions about Chinese Architecture held on Fridays and once on a Saturday dating from November 1941 to May 1942. The persons involved are Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun, Chen Kuan Lee and John Scott. Of Scott, a Germanised American, we know little: it seems his wife Gerda worked at Häring's art school. But Chen Kuan Lee is a key figure in this story. Born in Shanghai in 1919, he had arrived in Berlin in 1935 to study architecture under Hans Poelzig, completing the course in 1939. He then became Scharoun's assistant until 1941, working on the private houses that provided a limited creative opportunity under the Nazis. Lee returned to Scharoun's office in 1949, remaining there until 1953, one of only four assistants during the crucial period of 1951/1952 when Scharoun's new architecture was under development with key projects such as the Darmstadt School and Kassel Theatre. In between, Lee served as an assistant to Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949), the great German investigator of Chinese culture and author of several books on Chinese architecture. Boerschmann had visited China from 1906 to 1909, when he was sent by the German government to make a comprehensive cultural study, rather as Hermann Muthesius had been sent to England in 1896. To complete Lee's biography, in 1954 he set up as an architect on his own account, building several Chinese restaurants, more than 30 private houses and some apartment blocks in a Scharoun-like manner [1], some spatially very interesting, but this kind of work went out of fashion with the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s and Lee died quite recently in obscurity.