Bulletin of Catholic University of Peking

42 BULLETIN NUMBER FOUR

Front elevation of the Regional Seminary at Hongkong. Designed by Dom Adelbert Gresnigt, O.S.B.

namely, that type of Chinese architecture which is styled massive construction and in which the materials are exclusively brick, tile, and stone. The purest type of Chinese architecture, 1t is true, is not the massive, but the so-called Z’zng style, with its rows of columns and imposing roof. Nevertheless, the massive style represents a transition from the latter to buildings of a more solid character, with walls, arches, and vaulted ceilings. This type of construction has been used, not only for city-gates and fortresses, but also for temples, pagodas, dwellings, p’at-lows (memorial arches), etc. It is to be found all over China, though

more particularly in the vast yellow.

plains lying north of the Yang-tze River. The Western conception has entered here through the medium of Indian and Thibetan influence. But, like so many other things in China, this form, too, has undergone a pro-

cess of graceful naturalization. Under the alchemy of native genius, its massivity has been, as it were, dematerialized; its inertness has been enlivened by that fine sentiment which the Chinese show for rhythmic lines, and its austerity has been charmingly tempered by their poetic fantasy. Good exemplars of this solution are furnished by the temples with ’az-low facades and Chinese roof motives. Here we see a taste for simplicity combined with an innate sense of good proportions and proper ornamentation. Along such lines, it appears to me, there is every prospect of developing an economical form of Chinese architecture for church purposes. A solution of this kind, while leaving considerable latitude for originality and adaptation to modern needs will, at the same time, be neither alien to the Chinese sense of beauty and form nor incongruous amid Chinese surroundings. Rear elevation of the Regional Seminary at Hongkong.