A bracingly new take on China’s Mao-era architecture

For many Western scholars and critics, the architecture of Mao-era China has been something of a black hole.

This was certainly the case for me early in my career, when I began making trips to report on new architecture in China for the New York Times and, later, the Los Angeles Times. In writing about the flashy projects Beijing was commissioning in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, by firms including Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Herzog & de Meuron, and PTW, it was all too easy to set their formal daring against the stolid state-sponsored buildings that had gone up in the period between 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established, and the late 1970s, when in the wake of Mao’s death the country began to thoroughly reform its economy and open itself more directly to the world.

The precise social, cultural, and political conditions that gave rise to those earlier buildings, meanwhile, were not something many of us spent a whole lot of time exploring. Nor were we especially interested in parsing the markedly different periods of both political and design philosophy that China whipsawed through in those years, moving from a heavy reliance on Soviet expertise in the early days of the PRC to the Ten Great Buildings Mao commissioned and built in a manic burst of homegrown ambition at the end of the 1950s, to mark the end of the new government’s first decade in power.

It was simple enough to say that after the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966, architecture as a discipline was brought to heel, if not nearly eliminated altogether, as architects were labeled dangerous intellectuals and sent off to re-education camps or, seeing their professional autonomy stripped away, were subsumed into giant bureaucracies that included a number of government-run “design institutes” and tended to privilege engineering and construction knowledge over the architectural variety. As I wrote on one of those visits, by 2001, the year Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics, architecture in China had “withered as an art form and a profession.”

Of course, in a country as massive and complex as China, there is a good deal more to the story of how the country’s architecture culture evolved under Mao. As the curator Shirley Surya argues in the catalogue for “How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949-1979,” the remarkable new exhibition she’s organized with a team of collaborators at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, “historians and practitioners have long perceived the development of modern architecture in this period as stunted, in some cases questioning if it occurred at all.”

She adds, “If modern architecture is measured by features like abstraction, transparency, flat roofs, and the rejection of historical precedents, these views may seem fair. But the modern movement cannot be reduced to universal formal tropes.”

“How Modern,” a collaboration between CCA and the M+ museum in Hong Kong, where Surya is a curator, is instead interested in revealing “the tensions and layers that characterized architectural production in Mao-era China”—a period, as Surya puts it, when “the architecture profession benefited from, and at the same time bore the brunt of, China’s political flux.” The exhibition complements a number of recent efforts at CCA to produce what its director, Giovanna Borasi, calls “new readings of modern architecture across different sociopolitical contexts and geographical frameworks,” including “Casablanca Chandigarh” in 2013 and the late Jean-Louis Cohen’s “Building a new [sic] New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture,” which opened in 2019. 

“How Modern,” designed (full disclosure) by my friends and collaborators at the Los Angeles firm Johnston Marklee, offers a complex portrait of architectural ambition in the Mao period; Surya calls it “at once a question and proposition.” It includes everything from blueprints, photographs, magazine covers, and a handful of models to a film series by Wang Tuo, “Intensity in Ten Cities,” that combines oral histories with a storyline featuring fictional characters moving through landmark buildings from the period.

The exhibition is crisply divided into three thematic sections, each with a corresponding wall color: Agency (red-orange), Industry (blue), and Style (yellow). Many of its polemics—and I use that term in the most positive way—are front-loaded for inspection in the very first room, where Surya makes clear that she wants to define architectural agency not in the familiar Howard Roark fashion, with a stubbornly independent (and typically white male) architect seeking to remake the world one avant-garde and photogenic building at a time, but instead “as the ability to exercise creative and moral will to facilitate social betterment through political means.” Several key projects in Beijing, including Mao’s Ten Great Buildings, are examined through this lens.

A centerpiece of this section is video footage of the oral history with Yung Ho Chang, founder of the firm Atelier FCJZ, former head of the architecture department at MIT, and now Dean of the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture. He is the second son of Zhang Kaiji, one of the first prominent Chinese architects to join a PRC design agency, in his case what became the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, or BIAD. (As Chang puts it, his father, unlike “his good friend I.M. Pei,” chose not to leave Mao’s China in search of commissions in the West but instead to stick it out on the home front.) In his role at BIAD, an arm of the Ministry of Construction, Zhang worked on the design of everything from new housing estates and a workers’ sanatorium to a new spectator stand for Tiananmen Square. 

The most personally meaningful project of his long career, his son surmises, was the elegant Beijing Planetarium, from 1956, which features a pair of low-slung wings under a sizable dome and was the product of collaborations with artists from the city’s Central Academy of Fine Arts and structural engineers from East Germany. A color lithograph of the building from Jianzhu Xuebao, China’s sole architecture journal in the period between 1954 and 1979, is on display nearby.

It is to the exhibition’s credit that Chang is given room in the oral history to push back subtly against Surya’s overarching argument. (I wish more architecture shows would accommodate this kind of internal push and pull.) While he agrees that a reassessment of Mao-era architecture is overdue, he argues that his father’s designs were at crucial points “at the mercy of the political struggles of the period.” He also maintains that mainland Chinese architecture continues to lack the dynamism he sees in Hong Kong and the West: “There’s still a resistance to a more thoughtful understanding of design, instead of just focusing on maximizing floor area ratio and using expensive materials to make a building look prettier. This mentality is still predominant.”

The second section, Industry, begins with a goal Mao articulated not long after the CCP took power: that he wanted Beijing, in the recollection of its mayor, Peng Zhen, to be “a big modern city,” its skyline “filled with smokestacks.” Thankfully that didn’t come to pass, as a modest but significant preservation ethos within the government ranks helped protect central Beijing from Mao’s ambitions. But those ambitions flowered elsewhere, of course, in projects on view in “How Modern” that range from steel mills and social-housing complexes to the Third Front, a massive effort, propelled in part by Mao’s own anxieties about a potential invasion by Soviet or US forces, to relocate factory production from coastal cities to the country’s remote and mountainous interior.

In an astonishing section of another of the oral histories, the architect Zhu Guangya, who designed dormitories and other projects for the Third Front, recalls that the Cultural Revolution had so devalued architectural training in the eyes of party leaders that the design institutes began being taken over by “worker propaganda teams.” This led to some comical moments in the field as Third Front projects were being built: “Minor buildings often didn't even have proper blueprints. The leaders would say, ‘Just draw it directly on the ground, one-to-one scale!’….Then they’d start digging immediately and build right away—this is very characteristically Chinese.”

Equally fascinating is the entry on the modernist Fusuijing apartment block in Beijing, built with high-quality materials left over from the construction of the Ten Great Buildings and completed in 1960. An oral history with the artist Zhang Wei traces the tumultuous life of the project, from its “harmonious and satisfying” early years, when families paid a very low, “symbolic” rent and enjoyed the building’s rare modern amenities, which included elevators and central heating, to a harrowing existence during the Cultural Revolution, when tenants, many of whom came from intellectual or artistic families, became “targets for surveillance and control”; what’s more, the communal aspects of the building’s architecture amplified “the harmful political effects of the situation,” because so much of life there was lived in shared spaces that could be easily monitored.

The show’s final section, Style, traces the remarkable diversity of formal approaches Chinese architects pursued in nearly every corner of the country during the Mao era. Even the Ten Great Buildings project, launched explicitly to symbolize a certain vision of Chinese power and ambition, left room for some formal variety; the premier, Zhou Enlai, sent this reassuring guidance about style to the participating architects: “Use whatever is best, whether historical or modern, Chinese or foreign.”

“How Modern” is not without its blind spots. Though the show considers the design of Tiananmen Square at length, the 1989 massacre carried out there by government troops is not mentioned. The catalogue, too, is in a few places overly deferential to, or credulous of, the official CCP line on architecture, political history, or both. And while the oral histories are invaluable—and I am all for shaking up the expected ratio of moving images to historical documents in any architecture show—the fictional portion of Wang Tuo’s film project, its languorous and opaque scenes playing out on large-format screens, never quite seems to justify the outsized amount of gallery space it takes up.

Still, this is an absolutely masterful effort on the whole. Through sheer critical, curatorial, and scholarly determination, Surya and her collaborators—including Li Hua of Nanjing’s Southeast University, who co-edited the catalogue with Surya, and a curatorial team made up of Francesco Garutti, Megan Marin, Charlie-Anne Côté, Victoria Addona, and (at M+) Naomi Altman—have managed to sweep away a half-century’s worth of clichés and truisms about Chinese architecture under Mao, leaving a nuanced, complex, and fair-minded portrait in their place. “How Modern” runs through April 5 of next year.

News & Notes

Robert A.M. Stern, architect, writer, founder of a particular strain of postmodern architecture, TV host, and dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016, died yesterday at 86, according to a statement released by his firm. Stern shaped the culture at Yale, where I studied and now work, in countless ways. Though I didn’t know him especially well personally, over the years he generously walked me through a number of his buildings as I was preparing to review them for the Los Angeles Times (even as he might have guessed where my pieces were headed), including the new residential colleges at Yale, which opened in 2017, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. My wife works in a Stern project; my younger daughter studies in another. If you’re connected to Yale or to architecture, you exist to one degree or another in his shadow.

Several detailed obituaries have already appeared. (I’m partial to this one by Fred Bernstein, for the Washington Post; the New York Times this morning put its Stern obit on A1.) More recollections and comments poured onto social media as Thanksgiving Day wore on. Some praised Stern for his detailed mind or the consistency of his professional support. Others were sharply critical of his roster of clients or his attitude toward women in architecture. On Instagram, Sben Korsh, a doctoral student in architecture at the University of Michigan, captioned a photo of Stern this way: “Architect of George Bush’s Presidential Library, 17 business schools, and countless mansions for the ultra-wealthy. May he rest in peace with Philip [Johnson]. May architecture exist beyond patrons. May the academy outlive patrimony.” Paprika!, the student-run Yale architecture journal, reprinted an interview with Stern from 2016, as he was preparing to step down as dean.

Yesterday afternoon, I solicited further remembrances from some of my friends and colleagues and some of Stern’s. Here are some of the responses:

Alexander Gorlin: Bob Stern was my teacher at Yale for his South Bronx Suburbia studio at the height of the “Bronx is burning” time. After graduation, and upon returning from a Rome Prize fellowship, I set up my own firm and received a call from an unusually named potential client: Richard Ekstract. He was a former client of Bob’s and asked me to design a grand house in East Hampton. Somehow Bob learned about this call, and to my surprise, instead of congratulating me on one of my first commissions, tried to convince Ekstract not to hire me as an “inexperienced, green architect”! I was shocked, and although I did get the job and designed and built the house, which was widely published, I never forgot his post-graduate lesson. Whenever I think I’m being too aggressive about getting work, I conjure and channel Bob Stern and go into hyper-drive; the business of architecture, to paraphrase Hobbes, is "nasty and brutish.”

Shumi Bose: Sending you a portrait of Bob in a Miami Vice-style white suit, taken by Juergen Teller at Venice 2012 for David Chipperfield's Common Ground:

Elihu Rubin: I owe so much to Bob. He believed in me. He invited me to co-teach the Introduction to Urban Design course at Yale while still completing my dissertation in architectural history at the University of California—he would tease me for having gone to grad school at Berkeley and returned a Socialist. I was obnoxious; but Bob responded well to chutzpah. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” he once told me. I was part of a group hired by Bob to produce short videos for the School of Architecture gallery, including a film for the show “Saving Corporate Modernism” in 2001 that was produced by Nina Rappaport. Though it might have seemed out of character for a designer closely linked to neo-traditionalism, Bob had taken up the cause of neglected mid-century landmarks like the New Haven Coliseum. For the “Saving Corporate Modernism” show, one of the buildings in question was Connecticut General’s suburban campus, threatened when a consolidated CIGNA considered demolishing the campus and starting from scratch. Our film, “Back to the Garden: Corporate Modernism in Context,” focused on the work of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Gordon Bunshaft. We interviewed Natalie de Blois and Roger Radford of SOM, Peter Blake, Vincent Scully, David Childs, and others. After showing a draft of the video to Bob, he gave a note about the sequence of projects discussed in the video. Lever House should precede Connecticut General; first the city, then the country. I don’t remember what made me disagree, but I began to defend our “composition.” He cut me off. “You may be David O. Selznick, but I’m Louis B. Mayer—and the movie is what I say it is.”  

Brooke Hodge: I have to admit that my memory is a little foggy about when I first met Bob Stern. It was either in the late 1980s, when he was Director of the Buell Center, and I was a junior staffer at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, or it was in 1991, when I moved to New York for an ill-fated, unpaid, and mercifully brief stint at Peter Eisenman's office. Barry Bergdoll had to be involved somehow in my introduction to Bob since, in the late 1980s, he was curating an exhibition for the CCA on the Panthéon in Paris while finishing his dissertation at Columbia. There were lots of connections with Columbia in those early days of the CCA. What I do remember is that Bob Stern treated me with respect and kindness even though I was just starting out in the museum/architecture world. He was smart, he was funny, he was curious, and he had such a zest for life. I met Suzanne Stephens then too. She was the editor of Skyline and she and Bob were always together—at lectures, openings, and dinner parties. Did I say that Bob was curious? I recall that he and Suzanne really tried to get me to spill the beans about everything that was happening at Eisenman's office back then! 

Kazys Varnelis: I had the privilege of working with Bob on “The Philip Johnson Tapes.” Those aren’t idle words: It truly was a privilege. I first met Bob at the Philip Johnson symposium at Yale. I was rather surprised he had invited me, as I had been quite critical of his role in recuperating Johnson in the early 1970s, but that was the thing about Bob. He didn’t mind intelligent arguments; he hated stupidity. In contrast, he didn’t invite Franz Schulze, whose biography he felt was too sensationalistic, too eager to pander for sales, and too simplistic in its treatment of the history. It was my first symposium in which I was treated as an equal with the top figures in the field. In no small measure, that invitation led me to my position as director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Soon after, Joan Ockman, director of the Buell Center, asked if I would be willing to work with Bob to edit a series of tapes in which Stern—who had been director of the Buell Center in the 1980s—attempted an oral history of Johnson’s life. I listened to the first two hours and wholeheartedly agreed. This was fascinating material. Little did I know that as the tapes progressed, Johnson’s cardiac condition was deteriorating and the conversation would fall apart toward the end. But Bob and I soldiered on. I would spend three weeks editing a section, send it to him, and he would turn it around that evening from his house in Montauk. Bob’s recall of historical facts was second to none. It seemed to me that he knew every architect who had ever practiced in the city. He was a brilliant mind, and I enjoyed that time very much. I suppose the last time I saw Bob was at a public conversation about Johnson with the late Henry Urbach in 2012. Henry said that we would have martinis after the conversation. Oh no, Bob said, we will have them during. And so it was. I will raise a martini to his memory, as well as Henry’s, tonight.

Nicolas Kemper: Dean Stern called me into his office a few times while I was in school to give me hell. Once, I think after I wrote a piece calling for a Perspecta strike, he said that it was much easier to destroy an institution than to build one. That has stuck with me. 

Nina Rappaport: Bob was an insightful mentor and leader who set high standards at Yale, often with a bit of wit. He hired me in 1998 as editor of a still-to-be-determined large-format news magazine that we named Constructs and that continues to this day. When it came to my interviews of visiting architects, he would advise, “Edit so that everyone sounds their absolute best!” Bob had a sharp vision of what the school could be as a place of pluralism, while always emphasizing to the students that the center of the world was New York City. Significant for me as well was his support for the work of Docomomo New York/Tri-State and preservation of modern architecture. I’ll never forget accompanying him one evening on Metro North back to New York. He was reading a biography of a musical artist and, with his infamous black Flair marker, corrected the spelling mistakes and incomplete references in the margins of the already published book! 

Ian Volner: I’ve been dreading the prospect of Bob’s death for some time, certainly for sentimental though also for quite practical reasons: If you needed to know anything that had happened, anywhere, to anyone connected with American architecture in the last sixty years, all you had to do was get Stern on the horn. He not only held the keys to all manner of locked rooms—professional, personal—he took a lusty kind of joy in opening them up and showing you around, which somehow made you feel very clever for simply having asked. The loss of that kind of institutional memory is a terrible setback for architectural scholarship, and the loss of such a gracious and energetic person is a setback for the world.

Mark Lamster: I had met Bob a number of times before I began work on my biography of Philip Johnson, but I was nonetheless exceedingly anxious walking over to his office to interview him on Johnson for the first time. I knew he could essentially scuttle the book if he wanted, and the idea of going one-on-one with the man with encyclopedic recall who knew every skeleton in every closet was downright terrifying. Of course, I had nothing to worry about. He kicked his feet up (loafers and yellow socks, of course) and for the next two hours, and then again in later sessions, he was nothing but gracious and informative and brilliant, giving me an insider’s history and then pointing me to sources I needed to know and might never have found on my own. Of course this characterized his entire project of advancing the history of American architecture and engendering dialogue even with those whom he might not agree. It’s hard to imagine our culture without his presence, and we are all worse for its absence, but better for having it when we did.

As the day wore on, it became impossible not to notice that more men than women were replying to my open call. (This did balance out a bit in time.) Keeping Stern’s own major missteps on the question of architecture and gender very much in mind, I followed up with a couple of people, including the critic Alexandra Lange. There was still room for a contrarian take on Stern’s legacy, I told her, adding that I’d heard mostly from men so far: “Zero surprise there, but it would be great to widen the lens a bit…”

Her response?

“I think that is the take.”

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