Wang Da-hong

Wang was also a fiction writer, with two novels published. In February 2014, he was awarded Taiwan's National Cultural Award.

The Society for Research and Preservation of Wang Da-hong’s Architecture was founded in December 2013. Shyu Ming-song, secretary general of the society, says that Wang's single-story house (c.1953) on Jianguo South Road in Taipei “...was perhaps the first Western-style work with Chinese features to garner high acclaim in Taiwan”.

His notable works include the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Taipei. In the early 1960s, Wang won the competition to design the National Palace Museum, however his modernist design was ultimately rejected in favour of a more traditional approach by Huang Baoyu.

Returning to Shanghai in 1947, he met up again with Huang Zuo-shen, and they both started working as part of the Five United, a disparate group of Chinese architects who had mostly studied at British universities.

Wang was born in Beijing, but grew up in Shanghai and Suzhou. His father was Wang Ch'ung-hui, a prominent Chinese jurist, diplomat and politician. During the early 1930s, he went to school in Switzerland. In 1936, he started studying engineering at Cambridge University, before switching to architecture. In 1940, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he was taught by Walter Gropius. There, Wang was briefly a classmate of Huang Zuo-shen (aka Henry Huang), who would later become known as the founding director of The School of Architecture at Tongji University. Wang was also a classmate of both IM Pei and Philip Johnson.

Wang Da-hong (Chinese: 王大閎; 6 July 1917 – 28 May 2018) was a Chinese-born Taiwanese architect. Regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture in Taiwan, his architectural philosophy, whilst very modern in its application, was informed by both the traditional Chinese garden and the Siheyuan – a historical type of family residence which comprises several dwellings around a courtyard.