The former Sino-Soviet Friendship Building in Shanghai.Wang Tuo/Supplied
A factory disappears into a cave. Stalinist towers push toward the sky. The Great Hall of the People stretches out space for 10,000 citizens, columns marching as if the room itself were on parade.
These scenes emerge in How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979, an exhibition at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture. The show is a revelation, exploring a volatile period in Chinese history to show internal currents that have been obscured.
Curated by Shirley Surya and Li Hua, the show is a collaboration with the M+ museum in Hong Kong. It challenges a historical narrative: that postwar China lacked modern architecture, and that serious architecture only landed in China in the 1990s with the arrival of Western stars like OMA and Herzog & de Meuron.
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How Modern asks: What if flat roofs and capitalism are not the only ways to move forward? As Surya and Hua tell it, “the modern” can be identified with collective effort and the exertions of an industrializing state. There were flat roofs, in industrial and public buildings, but also a thousand explorations of how Chinese architectural and landscape tradition could be moved forward.
This story is not unique. There were many modern architectures, even in Europe and the Americas. In the Canada of the 1950s, governments and big businesses blended carved-stone ornament with expressions of pure geometric form.
The Water Pavilion at South China Botanical Garden in Guangzhou.Wang Tuo/Supplied
But it is compelling. After the 1949 revolution, Mao’s state drew on Soviet help and built plenty of Stalinist wedding-cake architecture. After China’s break with the USSR in 1960, architects often drew variations on the “big roofs” of Chinese historical architecture. Premier Zhou Enlai called for embracing “old and new, Western and Chinese.”
How Modern’s physical manifestation, designed by Johnston Marklee, closes this week, though its detailed online version remains active. It provides an eye-popping range of artifacts: gorgeous student drawings, souvenir mirrors printed with images of the Great Hall of the People, personal Brownie prints from the reconstruction of Tiananmen Square. These are drawn from archives and collections across China, in what must have been a feat of research and co-ordination.
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The scale of modernization is a familiar story. Between 1949 and 1959 construction in Beijing alone added 27 million square metres of floor area, doubling the city’s existing building stock. This included the “Ten Great Buildings” of 1958-59, in which architects from across the country worked collectively on structures that put the Chinese Communist Party’s stamp on the city, mixing traditionalist, neoclassical and functional-modernist idioms.
A perennial question remained: How modern? Leading architects including Zhang Kaiji, who joined the state-run Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, tried to solve this cultural and technical puzzle while dealing with an ever-shifting political climate. (Zhang’s son Yung Ho Chang points out the highly technical nature of Chinese architectural training and the many practical demands the government placed on its designers. For them, this was no utopia.)
Because of the state’s enormous vacillations, there is no single takeaway. Early calls for a “national style” that would speak to ordinary people encountered calls for thrift and pragmatism. As one slogan of the 1950s put it: “Function, economy and (when circumstances allow) beauty.”
Huagang Guanyu Park in Hangzhou.Wang Tuo/Supplied
How Modern brings enormous resources and considerable rigour to bear; I found myself wishing for such efforts to explore Canada’s own, understudied architectural history.
I discovered a partial answer down the hall in Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994. This show, curated by Farzin Lotfi-Jam, lovingly unpacks a special moment in Canada’s architectural discourse, a live symposium hosted by Brian Boigon at the Rivoli club in downtown Toronto.
The early 1990s saw architecture and electronic media collide as designers, animators and filmmakers all embraced emerging software tools. Boigon, an influential professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, brought together high-architecture figures such as Rem Koolhaas and Elizabeth Diller with artists such as Atom Egoyan, John Oswald and Sandra Shamas – drinks in hand – to discuss how to navigate the information superhighway. Video recordings of the events are sliced into 2,000 short clips, which Lotfi-Jam categorizes and presents in continuous play on four arrays of screens. These mimic Boigon’s ambitions for the event to be read as a medium in itself.
The Tongji University Auditorium in Shanghai.Wang Tuo/Supplied
The show (designed by House9) also includes drawings and ephemera from Boigon’s practice as an architect and animator, including his work on interactive cartoon Spillville. The array of LaserJet printouts and ideas for the early web, which he created with Toronto-based software studio Alias, carry a nerdy, cheerful optimism about the future: The new information superhighway was opening new territories of perception, and would remake both digital and physical space. As Marshall McLuhan – the Torontonian whose ideas hang in the background of Culture Lab – put it: “Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment.”
Little did we know. As Boigon continued his intellectual and artistic explorations, digital technology would remake architecture’s material conditions and production techniques, and not for the better. Often, a great leap forward comes at a cost.