It was a booming period of campus construction at

It was a booming period of campus construction at Tsinghua in the 1910s and 1920s, and the campus planning and construction on campus during that period, such as the Southern Gate (also widely known as the Hall of Tsinghua College, the Second Gate, er xiaomen), and Four Grand Buildings: the Auditorium, library, gymnasium, and Science Building, became a typical model of modern Chinese universities. Nearly all famous buildings of Tsinghua that typified the built environment in her formative years were built up during that time. However, it remains very vague what examples the campus designs of Tsinghua referred, and for what reasons such patterns were adopted.
Planning Tsinghua in the 1910s and the background of the construction of the Auditorium
A brief introduction of Guastavino Dome and Ribs System Vaulting was continued and improved in the Byzantine Empire and in the Islamic world. Two ways of resting a dome upon a square E-4031 were achieved by squinches and pendentives (Figure 9). Four squinches, one at each corner, effectively turn a square into an octagon – a shape on which it is possible to construct a dome, which was also used in the Auditorium at Tsinghua in the 1910s as can be seen in the next section. It is noteworthy that elements of conventional vaults are held together by friction produced by pressure of the elements against each other under the force of gravity. Because the vault׳s thrusts are concentrated at all four corners, its supporting walls need not be massive and require buttressing only where they support the vault. Moreover, Roman vault requires great precision in stone cutting, an extraordinarily expensive art that was declined in the West with the fall of Rome (Figure 10). However, certain construction techniques of Roman domes were preserved. Inside the concrete hemispherical dome of the Pantheon, “with five diminishing rows of coffers verging toward the oculus,” vertical partitions of the coffering effectively serve as ribs, although this feature does not dominate visually. It is because of the ribs that an oculus can rest on the top inviting even light to shine through. Although the techniques employed were different, in practice domes built in the Renaissance, like Roman domes, also comprise a thick network of ribs supporting much lighter and thinner infilling, and both had a large opening on the top except that a lantern was supported by ribs in the Renaissance as in Brunelleschi׳s and Michelangelo׳s masterpieces. Due to economic considerations, wood was widely used in place of masonry ribs to construct of domes for many centuries. During the mid-16th century, Philibert Delorme (1515–1570), a prominent architect of the French court, invented a new means of vaulting arched and domed spaces by laminating short curved segments of wooden planks into long, continuous structural ribs, so called “Delorme׳s Manner”. Planks of Delorme׳s dome were inexpensive, prefabricated, and easy to assemble. As no centering was required, Delorme׳s wooden dome was a major advance over other timber vault construction or laborious methods of vaulting in brick or stone (Figure 11). Thomas Jefferson who was the American Ambassador in France carefully studied Delorme׳s Manner of constructing domes, and upon his return to his hometown in Charlottesville, he used this method to build his Monticello and the rotunda at the University of Virginia, both milestones in American architectural history. However, though lightweight, wooden ribs were vulnerable to fire. For example, the dome of the rotunda at the University of Virginia was destroyed by fire in 1895 and was reconstructed by Stanford White afterwards. It was not until the late 19th century that a “new” technique of timbrel vault appeared in the US. Contrary to conventional vault, the timbrel vaults were thin and made of broad thin terracotta tiles that are laid “flat” with the curve of the vault, usually in two or more layers, deriving its rigidity not from massiveness or thickness but rather from its type of curvature (Figure 12).