Untranslatable Iconicity in Liang Sicheng’s Theory of Architectural Translatability

Abstract

In 1954, Liang proposed a theory of “architectural translatability,” arguing that an understanding of a universal linguistic principle that underlines different architectures could help translate buildings from one architectural system to another. To modernize the tradition of Chinese architecture, accordingly, was to translate its vocabulary and grammar with modern technology and material, yet without losing its essential formal characteristics. This “linguistic turn” was in line with Liang’s modernist approach to Chinese architectural heritage, seeing building art in its irreducible and essential form and constituents, but the “translingual” practice and subsequent debates about it in the next few decades, ironically, resuscitated major motifs of classical architecture as iconic features of Chinese architecture resistant to modern adaptation or appropriation. The “untranslatable iconicity,” as proposed in this paper, eventually signifies none other than the process by which the traditional form of architecture had been translated and re-translated until its meaning was completely reconceived and reinvented throughout twentieth-century China.