Tiananmen Square, a Ming-era space in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, expanded fourfold over the course of the 1950s, as it was laid out with museums, halls and monuments for the new People’s Republic of China. In the process much of the old city was destroyed, albeit while preserving the Forbidden City – the enclosed compound built in the 15th century to house the imperial family and its immense bureaucracy – as a focal point. There was, however, a counter-proposal to this programme of destruction. It came from the architect Liang Sicheng, an American-educated designer and historian, son of the late Qing reformer and intellectual Liang Qichao. The younger Liang devoted much of his life to researching and codifying historic Chinese architecture, which he regarded as proto-modernist in its use of open frames and replicable modules. In the 1950s, he headed one of the Communist capital’s major planning commissions. He proposed retaining the old city walls as a continuous public park, and placing a new administrative centre for the Communist government a couple of miles outside it. On the advice of Moscow planners and architects, Mao rejected the idea, preferring the new centre of power to be closely connected to the old one. Tiananmen as it exists today is the result.
In Chinese Shadows (1974), one of his many works debunking the culture and politics of Maoist China, the Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys criticized the architecture and planning of Tiananmen in great detail, hailing Liang’s counter-proposal as a great road not taken. Leys reserved particular scorn for the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square, a phallic stele of ‘brutal silliness’. Perhaps Leys didn’t realize that the planner who inserted this ‘revolutionary-proletarian obscenity in the middle of the sacred way’ was Liang Sicheng himself – he headed the team which designed the Monument and was responsible for its temple roof. But the tale is told again and again of Liang as the great conservationist and victim of Maoism, one of the many stories of socialist architecture that depart significantly from historical reality.
The same cast appears in How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979, a publication accompanying a new exhibition on the early architecture of the People’s Republic at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and M+ in Hong Kong. Liang, Mao and Tiananmen are all central players, but their roles are remarkably different to those in Leys’s version; How Modern is a much-needed revisionist account. It has always been hard to assess the architecture designed in the Mao era. The revived interest in post-war megaprojects – the state-socialist architecture in the USSR and Europe, the Metabolist megastructures of post-war Japan, Singapore and South Korea, or the ‘tropical modernism’ and postcolonial developmentalism of Latin America, India, Western Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa – has an absence at its heart: the massive East Asian state that inspired uprisings and guerilla wars across the world in the post-war decades. What is known is that the early PRC’s most prominent buildings, such as the Tiananmen ensemble of the 1959 Great Hall of the People and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, later supplemented by the 1978 Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, were a Sinofied version of American classicism. Look at the architectural images in the many English-language propaganda brochures of the time, and you’ll find a stodgy traditionalist-Stalinist mélange alongside all the factories and rural communes. Was there ever a revolutionary Chinese modernism to compare with the revolutionary architecture elsewhere in the same period?
For the authors of How Modern, this is asking the wrong question. Authors Shirley Surya and Li Hua are intent on describing what Mao-era architecture actually was rather than what it wasn’t. Surya’s introduction disclaims any definition of modernism via ‘stylistic tropes such as transparency, fluidity, the use of industrial materials, minimalism, flat roofs and rejection of traditional forms’, and eschews ‘the Cold War framework of analysis to denounce or glorify Chinese communism’. Although difficult subjects are not ignored – the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward is mentioned frequently, as is the arbitrary violence of the Cultural Revolution – the dispassionate approach is refreshing. The research is deep, extensive and surprising. You will find no Instagram-friendly modernist icons in here – nothing to propel the early People’s Republic into the same category as Brazil or Ghana as a lost centre of post-war postcolonial modernism. Much of this work also stands somewhat apart from the international debates of the time – aware of, say, Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus, but ploughing a distinct path. The book’s essays are supplemented by a clutch of fascinating interviews – with Zhang Wei, the painter of the nonconformist No Name Group and former resident of the Fusuijing Building, Beijing’s ‘People’s Commune Mansion’; the son of Zhang Kaiji, architect of the Museum of the Revolution on Tiananmen Square; the 1970s Beijing architect Mao Guoxin; and an architect of the Cultural Revolution era, Zhu Guangya. Some projects will be well known to those familiar with the early PRC – Tiananmen, of course, but also the Caoyang New Village in Shanghai, a Garden City cousin of the ‘neighbourhood planning’ projects in the USA like Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, with modest houses and flats and public pedestrian paths lined with trees. Caoyang was designed soon after the revolution in 1951, but not emulated, as Stalinist monumental planning became the official style. But there is a great deal that is new, both in architectural and political terms.
Deriving as it does from an exhibition, How Modern is especially interested in visual material. There are photographs, new and archival; Zhang Wei’s deadpan paintings of the People’s Commune Mansion he grew up in; documents and competition entries – including some much more modernist proposals for the Great Hall from 1958, and a neo-traditional Mao Mausoleum from 1976; and the volume is bookended with stills from Wang Tuo’s film Intensity in Ten Cities, which was shot in several of the showcased buildings. More uncomfortably, there is a photo essay on the various national ‘ethnic’ themed rooms in the Great Hall of the People, in which the folk crafts of Xinjiang, Tibet and elsewhere were reproduced in a plush version of the Stalinist notion of an architecture ‘national in form, socialist in content’. Best of all, there are several spreads from ‘the PRC’s first national pictorial magazine’, Manhua, which ran from 1950 to 1960. Manhua was both firmly communist and satirical, celebrating the new construction projects but mocking the impractical ‘formalism’ of both modernism (for its abstraction and its expensive technologies) and traditionalism (for interrupting light and space with decorative screens and grandiose colonnades). It celebrated the builders of the new state, as in a wonderful cartoon of construction workers assembled under the starry sky of the Great Hall; ‘the nights we fought to build this Great Hall’, reads the caption, ‘the sky was also filled with stars’. Or another, in which the inscription on the Monument to the People’s Heroes has been changed to ‘Construction workers – they are the true pioneers of nation building!’ Other cartoons would soon be impolitic, such as a fabulous fantasy in which Chinese and Soviet architects, tools aloft, ride a dragon whose mouth is a concrete dam from which water cascades dramatically – an image which became offensive with the acrimonious Sino-Soviet split.
One of the book’s major themes is the attempt at the ‘collectivization’ of architectural design under Mao, especially intense during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but spanning the era and beyond. Architects were organized into vast regional state institutions, many of which survive as profit-making but still nationalized SOEs; the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design is given the most attention here. The ultimate aim of this system was to involve ‘the masses’ in design as much as possible. For the Mao Mausoleum, as the Beijing architect Ma Guoxin recalls, architects were told ‘this project should reflect the collective wisdom of the whole country’; proposals were submitted in their thousands. In the end, what the collective came up with was a lightly modernized clone of the Lincoln Memorial, which rather suggests the limits of the approach. Some of the interviewees lament how, in the words of Zhang Kaiji’s son, ‘architecture was at the mercy of the political struggles of the period’, with neo-traditionalist ‘big roofs’ or austerity or forms of modernism all in vogue at unpredictable moments, often dictated by the swings of policy. But others are straightforwardly supportive of collective design. As Ma Guoxin points out, ‘you need a lot of people to design a project’, so it’s always ‘a collective creative process’ that nevertheless at best ‘still reflects individual style’.
This went further in the Cultural Revolution. Zhu Guangya, whose main task was designing the factories and housing of the ‘Third Front’, the new industrial centre in southwestern China strategically distant from the Soviet border, became an architect at a time when ‘worker propaganda teams had taken over the design institutes’. He and his contemporaries regarded the PRC’s more powerful architects, such as Liang Sicheng, as elitist pests, constantly trying to preserve historic buildings that were in the revolutionaries’ way: ‘people would ask “is that what architecture is – lecturing us?”’ The results, especially in the first years of the Cultural Revolution, were fairly miserable: unimaginative buildings built quickly and poorly, many of which have disappeared. But even here there are exceptions. The Cultural Revolution’s own ‘icon’ was the spectacular Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, an ambitious engineering structure which was substantially redesigned by popular suggestion: a group of construction workers proposed turning the project into a two-level rail and road bridge with sculptural piers bearing heroic propaganda. For Surya and Li, the bridge is the embodiment of an era when ‘architecture was not viewed as an “art”, but rather a collective creation born from the wisdom and skills of workers’.
Most of the little attention that has been paid to Mao-era architecture in the West has been focused on style, and the alleged repression of modernists in favour of neo-traditionalists whacking huge wide-eaved tiled roofs onto everything. This is not wholly debunked in How Modern, but it is complicated. There was a great deal of Chinoiserie, some of it more picturesque than totalitarian, like the Huagang Guanyu Park in Hangzhou, designed in a late Ming/early Qing ‘literati’ style adapted for the mass public, here illustrated with a lovely propaganda watercolour. The responsibility for the Mao-Ming ‘big roof’ style is attributed less to Stalinism, and more to the influence of the KMT’s Republic of China between 1925 and 1949 (official architecture under Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan was also expressly neo-traditionalist). Moreover, one of the architects most responsible was the sainted Liang Sicheng, whose Architecture of the Motherland (1954) demonstrated how to put traditional ornament and big roofs on Western buildings without spoiling their proportions.
Yet there’s plenty of modernism here too, especially in the south of the country – and strikingly, much of it is from the early 1950s, before Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist opulence saw modernism return to the USSR. Particularly impressive examples include the streamlined Tangshan Workers’ Sanatorium of 1956 in Nanjing and the placid, lightweight pavilions of Reed Flute Cave, a scenic spot in Guilin which was redesigned in 1959 to house ‘modern reinterpretations of Chinese vernacular dwellings and traditional gardens’. Most arresting of all is an entire estate of private villas in strict Bauhaus style for Overseas Chinese returnees, built in 1950s Guangzhou. At a time when most workers lived in barracks and shacks, this was surely an emblem of the sort of inequality which the Cultural Revolution would ruthlessly target. By comparison, though, that later generation’s own experiments with modernism could be deeply derivative, as seen in the hyperbolic paraboloid Zhejiang Gymnasium in Hangzhou, built in 1969, a late imitation of Maciej Nowicki’s 1952 Dorton Arena in North Carolina, a concrete structure much emulated across the world in the 50s and 60s. The better Cultural Revolution architecture was a reaction to pure necessity – the carefully camouflaged factories of the Third Front, for instance; one munitions factory documented here, in Hunan, comprises a concrete grid half-concealed in a cave.
What makes How Modern timely and intriguing is the attention to the Third Worldism of the Mao era – its attempts to engage with local building traditions, non-industrial materials and what sixties radicals would call ‘alternative technologies’. This side of Maoist architecture was a response to the immense poverty that China faced by the 1940s, after a century of wars both civil and national, regular popular uprisings, and the exploitative effects of the colonial ‘concessions’ on the coast. It is remarkably dissimilar to the Dengist approach of simply doing what the West was doing but bigger and, gradually, better. So on the one hand, the PRC also had its school of ‘tropical modernism’, with grids of concrete louvres in Guangzhou designed in the late 1950s by a team under the Karlsruhe-trained modernist Xia Changshi, charged with devising passively climate-controlled buildings in the absence of air-conditioning. Other architects experimented with gan da lei, a method of building with rammed earth, used for workers’ housing at the model factory-and-housing complex at Daqing Oil Field, where it looks sane and attractive: though, as the authors point out, Daqing’s imitators were often failures due to cost-cutting, a familiar story. Similar ‘alternative technologies’ could be found in the use of bamboo frames, especially for domes and wide-span arches, a very old and ubiquitous construction method in much of China. Tongji University in Shanghai’s No 1 Student Cafeteria, nicknamed the Great Bamboo Hall, was a celebrated example, though today nearly all of this highly perishable architecture has disappeared. A rare exception is the Hunan Chenzhou Bamboo Training Hall of 1978, ‘where the Chinese women’s volleyball team once trained’, which, Surya and Li write, ‘has been preserved for its unique sociopolitical significance as a source of national pride’.
Maoist rural revolution had its own architecture, too. How Modern has a remarkable section on the New Dazhai Agricultural People’s Commune, a model collective farm in Shanxi (slogans would incessantly instruct peasants to ‘Learn From Dazhai’). Surya and Li point out that Dazhai itself, carefully adapted to the landscape and soil conditions, was a highly successful project, while its imitations, operating in different contexts, were predictably disastrous. Architecturally, it seems to have been equally extraordinary. The images here, from a 1974 feature in the magazine Jianzhu Xuebao, show the Commune as an expansion of Robert Owen’s New Lanark in Scotland into a vast series of rows of stone dormitories whose pitched roofs rise in sequence up a steep hill. At Dazhai, the communal idea was executed in hardcore fashion. In these stone tiers, ‘interiors typically consisted of a single space’, without ‘partitions for functions like living, sleeping and dining’, taking collective living much further than early Soviet projects like the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow. But there were urban experiments that were closely comparable to the Moscow communes of the late twenties, particularly the People’s Commune Mansion, built in Beijing in 1958. On the account of Zhang Wei, life here was both communal and, for the time, highly comfortable, outfitted with unusual mod cons such as ‘private bathrooms with flush toilets, elevators and central heating’. Instead of private kitchens, there were two shared cooking spaces on each floor and internal walkways that aimed to encourage interaction. Zhang recalls that the building was extremely popular, especially with the socialist intelligentsia.
It is easy to see why, with such structures the fruit of thirty years’ building, Deng’s call to learn from the ultramodern, dynamic cityscapes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo was so little resisted. This is, Great Halls aside, an austere architecture, often ponderous, and reflecting the lack of connection with international debates by returning to familiar Beaux-Arts models of axial classical planning. But flashes of the future can be found. There are hints of the Belt and Road in the many projects embarked upon in the spirit of Third World solidarity and south-south co-operation, presented here as rather less rosily egalitarian than official rhetoric would suggest. But the range is impressive, including factories in Sihanouk-era Cambodia, a stadium in Islamabad, tower blocks in Mongolia, and most famously, an entire railway from Tanzania to Zambia.
Much else has left little legacy in the PRC, where mass participation in the work of ‘experts’ or the deployment of hippy technologies in construction could not have been less fashionable during the technocratic developmentalist decades beginning in the 1980s. It seems rather less eccentric today, when China’s prestige architects like Wang Shu in Hangzhou or Liu Jiakun in Chengdu have turned to rural construction, recycled materials and a peasant roughness; perhaps China is now distant enough from Maoism to be able to approach some of these ideas with a certain objectivity. How Modern provides a great service to this process of understanding; one hopes it will be followed by a similar project on the first two decades of ‘reform and opening up’, before the mass arrival of Western celebrity architects in the 2000s and 2010s. The Deng years are almost as much of a black box as the Mao era, containing just as many secrets – probably more Soviet-style concrete panel public housing was built in the 1980s than in the previous three decades, for instance, while the balance of state and market was more complex and disputed than contemporary accounts of a neoliberal sellout might suggest. But unlike the buildings of Maoism, so many of which have vanished, Dengist architecture still stands, its bright colours fading, its lifts breaking down, its mirrorglass dirty and rotten.
Read on: Teemu Ruskola, ‘The Making of the Chinese Working Class’, NLR 151.