“A cave complex worthy of Batman!” The amazing buildings that showed the world the new China Build

IIn 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formal methods of Western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have emerged.”

Under the headline “Ugly Architecture,” humorous caricatures of bizarre buildings fill the page. There is a modern drum with a bolted neoclassical portico to the front. Another bulbous building is surrounded by an arch of ice cream cone columns. One experimental bus stop has a bench under an impractical cube awning, “unable to protect you from the wind, rain or sun,” as one passerby noted. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another puzzled figure, cowering beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of a corrupt capitalist West.

It’s one of many entertaining archival documents featured in How Modern, a fascinating new exhibition at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which explores the development of modern architecture in the first decades of Communist China. The years following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, up until the reform and opening-up period of the 1980s, are often viewed as a period of monotonous monotony. In the vulgar eyes of Western historians, these decades in China can easily be dismissed as a period when state-produced buildings, designed by national architectural institutes, were as monolithic as the Mao jackets worn by a sprawling nation of repressed automatons.

This exhibition paints a very different picture. Curated by Shirley Soria of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, in collaboration with Li Hua, professor of architectural history at Nanjing Southeast University, the exhibition draws on official archives as well as materials in private collections in Hong Kong, some of which were smuggled out of the country decades ago and never before exhibited. Together they depict a surprisingly fertile period of invention, technological innovation, and stylistic debate, at a time when architecture was deployed as a tool for socialist nation-building—shaping cities, rural life, industry, and collective identity.

The story they tell also helps explain the direction in which China is moving today, under President Xi Jinping, as he doubles down on his ban on “exotic buildings” imported from the West and amplifies his appeals for distinctly “Chinese architectural styles” in new developments.

It begins at point zero, in the form of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a place that, under Xi Jinping, has become the most fortified and monitored public place on the planet. It is surrounded by walls on all sides, with airport-style security checkpoints, and can only be accessed by reservation. Alongside his greatly expanded plaza, Mao launched a campaign for “Ten Great Buildings,” a series of massive civic structures that would define the new aesthetic, “socialist in content, patriotic in form.”

From the massive Great Hall of the People (shown in stunning poster-sized photographs of the interior), to the Beijing Railway Station, the Palace of Culture for Nationalities and the Workers’ Stadium (shown in striking blue and pink on a souvenir mirror), these buildings experimented with a new hybrid style, fusing Beaux Arts classicism with Soviet monumentality and modern functionalism, often crowned with traditional Chinese overhanging tile roofs.

It was an unprecedented national campaign, carried out with unparalleled speed. More than 1,000 architects and engineers from across China were invited to participate in a month-long design workshop, while factories and construction workers were urged to build with “high quality, high technical standard and high speed,” with the ten great buildings completed in less than a year. By 1959, a photography exhibition at the RIBA in London marveled at how astonishingly 350 million square meters of building in China had been completed in just one decade.

Not all architects involved were happy with the design directives, which were imposed from above. “My father wanted the freedom to try different things,” recalls Yong Ho Chang, speaking in one of the exhibition’s illuminating oral histories, which are shown alongside intermediate films of major projects by video artist Wang Tuo. Zhang’s father, Zhang Kaijie, was a senior architect at the state-led Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, and the author of many pioneering projects of the period. “But he got the big roof as a standard design model. He didn’t like that.”

The Kaiji Project for the Sanlei State Office in Beijing, begun in 1952, reveals his struggle to adopt a formal “big roof” style. It also shows how quickly the dictates of party design will change, as mandated ideology flips back and forth in Orwell’s system of doublethink. Most of the buildings in the office courtyard complex in Sanlihe are covered with traditional Chinese hip and gable roofs with wide eaves. But the larger central block, finally completed, remains bare, stripped of its elaborate crown.

the reason? At some point during construction, after a speech by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, criticizing the extravagance of the elaborate Stalinist architecture before him, the Chinese Ministry of Architecture suddenly denounced the reactionary cultural revival of the grand roof style. The People’s Daily published a scathing editorial, criticizing the national architecture magazine, Jianzhou Xiubao, for “promoting wrong architectural ideologies” and attacking the “extreme extravagance and formalistic tendencies” of the national style.

By 1955, the year Sanllé was completed, the architects’ new motto was: “Function, economy, beauty (when possible)” – the bane of extraneous decoration. The central block of Sanllehe will forever be known as “the great roof that lost its hat.”

By the 1960s, as Mao’s rule entered its harshest phase, it was not only traditional methods that came into question; The architects themselves were in the line of fire. In 1964, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution – which saw intellectuals sent to the countryside for a brutal process of “re-education” – Mao launched the Design Revolution movement. This was an early attempt at inclusive proletarian participatory design, which saw technicians, manual laborers and even farmers mobilized to collaborate on design and construction, marginalizing architects and their “writings”.

The goal was to achieve “bigger, faster, better, more economical” construction by reducing investment, improving technology, and simplifying work processes. But as Michael Gove found with his suspicion of “experts,” excluding competent professionals has had exactly the opposite effect. The grim reality of the period – a time of mass starvation, forced labor, and state-sanctioned violence – is barely mentioned in the exhibition, exposing the climate of self-censorship now prevalent in Hong Kong, and the sensitivities of working with a Chinese partner institution.

Despite the somewhat propaganda tone, there are countless interesting design stories to be discovered. One room displays the infrastructure projects of the Third Front, a secret government campaign to develop industrial and military facilities in the interior of the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Hobby’s second automobile works were spread across 27 different sites, each hidden in its own valley, like something out of Tracy Island. Factory 544, which produced artillery fuses, was hidden inside a dramatic cave complex in Hunan, worthy of Bruce Wayne’s comrade.

The beautiful traditional woodblock prints, produced in the late 1970s when the program was finally published, depict karst mountain formations, with the heroic bridges, towers and tunnels criss-crossing them. “By self-reliance and hard work,” the slogan on the side of one aqueduct urged “rearranging mountains and rivers” – a reclamation philosophy that continues to this day.

Other sections focus on modular housing programs and modular furniture production, while one room shows how widespread shortages of cement, steel, and wood led to experiments with industrial byproducts and local materials, from rammed earth to construction waste. Soot, slag and fly ash have been used to produce building blocks and wall panels for prefabricated housing and factories, while bamboo has been widely used as a substitute for steel in long-span structures, including the stunning Bamboo Hall at East China Normal University.

And with Hong Kong regulators misguidedly phasing out the use of bamboo scaffolding, a move accelerated by a recent tragic fire (in which flames spread more through plastic netting than through bamboo), the authorities would do well to look to this period – a time when resource scarcity led to a period of lean, low-carbon innovation, by necessity.