"In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared. China's strangest buildings, from pairs of pants to ping-pong bats Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun, as a passerby observes. Why don't these buildings adopt the Chinese national style? asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west."
"It was an unprecedented national campaign, rolled out at unparalleled speed It is one of the many entertaining archival documents that feature in How Modern, a fascinating new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which explores the development of modern architecture in the first decades of communist China. The years after the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949, to the period of reform and opening-up in the 1980s, are often seen as a time of drab monotony. In the cliched eyes of western historians, these decades in China are easily dismissed as a period when state-produced buildings, designed by national architecture institutes, were as homogeneous as the Mao jackets worn by the sprawling nation of suppressed automatons. An interior of the Great Hall of the People, during the National People's Congress, 2025. Photograph: Tingshu Wang/Reuters This exhibition paints a very different picture. Curated by Shirley Surya from M+ museum in Hong Kong, with Li Hua, professor of architectural history at Southeast University in Nanjing, it draws on official"
A Montreal exhibition examines modern architectural development in communist China from 1949 through the 1980s using archival documents, cartoons and photographs. State-sponsored satire such as a 1954 Manhua issue lampooned architects who adopted Western bourgeois formalism and depicted grotesque hybrid buildings. Visual materials show absurd forms—buildings shaped like pants or ping-pong bats, a modernist cylinder grafted with a neoclassical portico, ice-cream cone columns and impractical bus-stop canopies—and critique foreign influence and impractical design. Curators from M+ and Southeast University assembled entertaining official materials to reveal a far more varied architectural landscape than commonly assumed.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]