Drawing the identity of architect: Liu Jipiao as an artistic architect in the late 1920s China

This article investigates the responsibility of architectural drawing in developing the professional identity of modern architects in the late 1920s when Chinese architects started to emerge and assume the title of “architect.” Using architectural drawing as both its subject and its method, this research interrogates how a representative figure – Liu Jipiao employed the power of drawing to establish the identity of the modern Chinese architect.This paper argues that architectural drawing, in establishing the identity of the Chinese architect, faced the requirement to build an affinity between the architect and the artist. The entangled history of these two professions offers up Liu as the representative figure of the artistic architect. Liu's artistic drawing fulfilled the previously mentioned requirement and earned the architects the artistic power that distinguished them from their counterparts – the engineers.Under the perspective of multiple modernities, the paper challenges the contemporary misreading of Liu Jipiao as an irrelevant individual intellectual and of his practice as a minor failure. Furthermore, this article invites further reflection on the modernity of Chinese architectural drawing, and shows how such drawing made more attempts to convey subjectivity rather than to transmit modern technique per se.