Several issues in architectural design since liberation (1956)Footnote ¹

In the short span of seven years since liberation, the field of architecture and design has seen significant accomplishments within the task of socialist construction …

… These accomplishments are guided by the principles put forward by the central government: “function, economy, and as much attention to beauty as conditions allow.”Footnote ² And indeed, I think these principles are completely in accordance with the dynamic unfolding of our country’s socialist construction. As such, architecture and design have seen huge successes as a field, and there is much for people to be excited about. All of this is thanks to the sound leadership of the Party and government, the immense effort of architects and designers, as well as the active collaboration of comrades across many fields—all united in common struggle for the construction of a socialist China.

And yet it cannot be denied there are still significant unresolved problems, many of which are owed to a lack of coordination between organizational structures, and, even more centrally, a general lack of clarity regarding the overall bases and principles of architecture and design. What exactly are these problems? I believe them to be the following:

1. 1 Lack of understanding: Some comrades do not fully grasp the complexity of architectural design work. They think design is merely the drawing up of illustrative diagrams, with the real task consisting of material calculations and compositional arrangementsFootnote ³ …There are those who view design work as a form of factory production. They treat it as though machines are being produced on an assembly line, not considering the complex nature of the project and without allowing enough time to analyze problems and consider proposals. As a result, many comrades in design institutes are severely overburdened, as the total square meterage of completed projects serves as the main criterion for evaluating their performance. This in turn creates confusion, carelessness, and unnecessary haste and disorder. We must understand that architectural design is not an unspecialized form of physical labor that can be carried out through methods of mechanical production. Indeed, some design institutes have experimented with an assembly line approach. Yet, once a design group hands over a finished plan to a structural group for calculation, lo and behold, as soon as the equipment group receives the calculations, the assembly line sputters before even getting started. This is because, as soon as one facet is (necessarily) sent back to the previous group for rework or modification, this linear mode of production cannot cope, and upstream inefficiencies result across the system. We must recognize the highly dynamic and interdependent nature of architectural design, which resists reduction to such a rigid system. The process demands not only extensive knowledge but also the continuous, reciprocal application of that knowledge to address challenges that emerge at every stage of design and implementation … And, as architects, we must realize the responsibility we bear to national construction and the well-being of our people.

2. 2 Pursuit of form: In the early days after liberation, most architectural design work across the country still followed old practices; that is to say, a patchwork of disorganized and independent styles and approaches. The scene was thus extremely chaotic, as architects pursued forms from various countries and eras, including forms copied directly from the magazines of capitalist countries. Then, following the critique of cosmopolitanism and structuralism, an incorrect understanding of national forms gave rise to a revivalism and formalism. Double-eave, pavilion-style roofs, held up by cap-and-lock brackets, and adorned by the traditional “five ridges, four animals” motif cropped up throughout the country.Footnote ⁴ Methods employed in Qing-era temple and palace architecture essentially became the everyday handbooks for current designers. Axe-edge bricks and glazed tiles were the ideal materials for these architects.Footnote ⁵ The pursuit of this form led to many buildings being unnecessarily forced into symmetrical designs. Brackets were hung under eaves, and unnecessary decorations were applied both inside and out—ostentatious and impractical, this was a total waste of state resources … Urban planning was marked by an overemphasis on central axes and a disregard for natural conditions. Radial and circular traffic networks were applied uniformly without considering the differences between geographic regions and their topography, resulting in difficulties in implementation due to this unrealistic planning. The situation has improved somewhat since the critiques of revivalism and formalism; however, it now appears the that pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Some comrades believe that national forms are not needed at all. To them, Chinese architecture has lost its purpose, and it should no longer be an object of study. I believe this is also incorrect—it is itself a formalist view, and an unrealistic one not grounded in a genuine truth-seeking attitude …

3. 3 One-sided views: The excessive focus on form is a prime example of a one-sided viewpoint. This situation was very widespread and very serious before the critiques of revivalism and formalism. By neglecting practical requirements and failing to consider whether the materials, structures, and building methods adhered to economic principles, the country incurred significant losses. After the critique of revivalism, and after learning the call to oppose waste and practice thrift, a new one-sided viewpoint has emerged within architectural design—pure economic thinking. This one-sided approach is marked by the sole focus on saving immediate costs at the expense of project quality and long-term planning. For some projects, this creates problems even before completion, often impeding handover and thereby affecting their use.

4. 4 Indiscriminate labeling: We have criticized the tendency to erect monuments in the name of individual heroism. At the height of revivalism, almost any method that deviated from the large roofs of the popular palatial- and temple-style architecture was met with a derisory label, regardless of its practicality or cost-efficiency. If a flat roof or a simple design was proposed, it was immediately called out as “structuralist architecture,” or else offhandedly dismissed as a glass box.Footnote ⁶ This made designers feel as though the only viable option was to imitate and reuse old forms; anything else appeared completely unacceptable within that political climate. Only by imitating some Soviet architectural elements under the banner of “learning from the Soviet Union” could one avoid criticism. As a result, the creativity of new projects was stifled, and many buildings were detached from their practical purposes …

5. 5 Working conditions: Experienced architects often have to take on a multitude of administrative tasks. From dusk until dawn, they find themselves in meetings, unable to focus on actual design. Everyone discusses at length, but no one is afforded the time for detailed design research. Institutions are frequently reorganized and cannot stabilize in time for the drafting and completion of projects. Although the situation has improved somewhat recently, these problems persist. Then there are those comrades who, overwhelmed by heavy workloads, find themselves daily stuck at the drawing board, without the opportunity to visit work sites to grasp on-the-ground conditions. There are not enough reference books or related materials, and these comrades do not have sufficient time to thoroughly research and think through their work. Some individuals who are well suited to teaching or research have taken up administrative posts instead, leading to the gradual neglect of their professional skills and considerable mental burden. Those who are experienced in residential design should be allowed to continue working in this area, thereby utilizing their expertise, rather than being forced to change fields. When it is difficult to find suitable personnel for specific tasks, these experienced individuals should be assigned to support the understaffed teams [further providing chances for them to utilize their expertise, while simultaneously] allowing work to proceed smoothly [despite the labor shortage in specific locales or projects].

6. 6 Collective creation: Collaboration and the pooling of diverse ideas is generally an advantage within design work; however, if not handled correctly, it can lead to negative consequences. Having studied architecture theory only to be met with the situation of indiscriminate labeling, some designers became dispirited and thereafter strove not for success but instead only to avoid mistakes. In this context, they could rely on the concept of collective creation—allowing everyone to contribute their ideas and then merging as many suggestions as possible into a single design [as a way to anonymize their intervention and thereby avoid critique]. But opinions that have not undergone detailed research and analysis in their own right are unlikely to be appropriate simply by combining them together. It merely serves to obscure and disperse responsibility across the group. If the building is completed and the masses are satisfied, fine, but if the masses have a complaint, it is difficult to identify who should be held accountable. I believe that collective creation must adhere to democratic centralism, where the lead designer has both the authority to make decisions and the duty to suffer the consequences of the outcome. Gathering ideas from everyone is beneficial, but the lead designer must carefully consider these suggestions and have full authority to negotiate them. Before assigning a task, careful consideration must be given as to whether the project’s nature and the designer’s qualifications, abilities, and experience are appropriate for the assignment. Following careful consideration, the selected designer should be given full responsibility for the assignment. Their work should be freed from undue interference so that the design of the building can be executed properly. Here, I have another suggestion. When an architect designs a structure, this in some ways resembles an author writing an article or book. Articles and books bear the name of their author, so why, then, must the designer of a building be anonymous? On the contrary, I believe that the signing of one’s name not only encourages creativity, but also increases the designer’s sense of responsibility to the project.

… Currently, construction tasks are many, and the burden is a heavy one. There are many things that need doing and few people to do them. Uneven distribution of work and improper assignments have had a significantly deleterious impact. We should criticize narrow-minded thinking, support institutions that lack manpower, and create measures for adjusting local institutions and personnel. Equally imperative, we must go a step further in giving the chief authors of architectural designs adequate working conditions and environments, while also providing opportunities for further training.

… If revivalism, formalism, and structuralism have all been sufficiently criticized, then what comes next? What is to be done when it comes to concrete design in the future? Since our architecture serves socialist construction, its nature should be socialist, and it should thus meet practical needs. As long as we reject the simple pursuit of form, avoid one-sided viewpoints, and earnestly seek the truth from facts on the basis of those design principles proposed by the central government, then the national style of a new China will gradually take shape. This style will be vivaciously dynamic, abundantly creative, and fully reflective of our social life. However, this entails a process, one that follows from and matures alongside the improvement of our architects’ professional abilities and the development of new materials and new methods … But again, we cannot ignore our country’s specific conditions. We must capitalize on our enormous labor power and our breadth of local materials and methods (bamboo, earthen walls, and so on), utilizing these particular conditions to the greatest extent possible. Since the Central Committee put forward the call to “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend,” an invigorating new atmosphere has emerged across various fields, such as science, technology, literature, and art. Architecture is no exception. Whether in professional or educational work, all feel as though animated by a new driving force, giving those of us engaged in the work of improving architectural design a newfound confidence. We should unite in common purpose to improve our design institutions, our creative capacity, and our teaching quality, so that our architecture and design work can play a greater role in this country’s socialist construction.

On the issue of architectural style (1961)Footnote ⁷

In the blossoming days of spring, comrades in the field of architecture, encouraged by the party’s call to “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend,” ardently set about a scientific investigation into architectural style … Now, the wide-ranging manner in which those scientific investigations were carried out, executed, and summarized, and their subsequent impact on theory, are of immense import for the further improvement of our architectural work. Nevertheless, looking at some of the differences of opinion that have emerged in newspapers (particularly around the topic of architectural style) I cannot help but feel compelled to offer some preliminary thoughts on the matter. I humbly offer them below for criticism.

I believe it necessary to first clarify the definitions of these two terms, “architecture” and “style,” as many of the debates over these concepts come down to a simple difference of interpretation. Some say that architecture is simply the building of houses, which seems far too narrow. Is it not the case that monuments too are a product of architecture? Similarly, there are those who take style to mean merely form, and still others who go so far as to confine style to a structure’s artistic effect. I, however, think that both architecture and style should be understood in broader terms. That is to say, the domain of architecture is not only a single structure, or even a group of structures; rather, it encompasses city and residential planning. Style, for its part, is a synthesis of material and spiritual factors, combined to generate an impression. Style can still be good or bad. For instance, within capitalist society there exists some strange and eccentric architecture. We may deem it to be good or we may take exception—but this does not mean that those structures lack a kind of style.

Architecture is a dialectical unity of function, economy, and aesthetics. These three facets interrelate and mutually constrain one another. Depending on material conditions, a given facet’s relative importance may vary. Architectural style, then, can be said to be the synthesis of functional handling, material application, and spiritual manifestation as experienced by a person vis-à-vis a particular structure. This experience is the product of a broad and complex combination of many factors, which start from the material structure and its objective conditions and exert various degrees of influence. These main factors can be summarized as the following:

1. 1 Natural conditions: The impressions that a structure engenders are dependent on the larger natural environment, including mountains and rivers, swelter and frost, windswept sand and rain (what me might call topography, climate, and precipitation). Many of the cities handed down by history to the north China plain were meticulously planned according to the cardinal directions, with most residences facing the sun. Exterior walls were built particularly thick to protect against the cold. The south, rich with water, left many cities and towns developed around shipping docks. In those towns in mountainous areas, we find uneven roads that snake across the hillside. In the Yangtze basin, the mild climate allowed simple wooden partitions to suffice for winter, while in Guangdong, promoting cross-ventilation was crucial. In mountainous areas, apart from some buildings placed between the foot of the hill and a stream (or those set overhanging the cliffside), many houses made use of local materials like stone blocks, stone slabs, and bamboo joinery. Those on the plains made use of broad frames and rammed-earth walls, alongside some brick and tile construction.

2. 2 Social systems: In capitalist societies, private landownership, uncoordinated land management, and unregulated development have resulted in a chaotic and disordered urban landscape, one that visually manifests (as well as itself creating) the stark contrast between the rich and poor. Architecture in a class society always reflects the character of class. Under systems of socialism and democratic centralism, construction is carried out in a planned and systematic manner, with a particular emphasis on human care and convenience for the masses. Not only is the visual appearance of the city rationally ordered, but so too are the housing complexes, welfare facilities, daycare centers, and preschools of the people’s communes, and thus they vastly differ from the rent-seeking high-rises erected by capitalist investors. Public buildings, such as the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, fully demonstrate the grand vision of this new society and the superiority of the socialist system. Take the gardens of Suzhou as another example. These were once private places of enjoyment for the bureaucrats and landlords of the old society, and thus are characterized by small bridges over flowing water with winding paths through secluded alcoves. Now, the people’s gardens are as boundless as the sea and sky, facilitating the enjoyment of the masses and enabling vacations for thousands upon thousands.

3. 3 Science and technology: In the past, we primarily used natural materials. Today we are gradually using manufactured products. Whereas before most work was done manually, modern practices involve machine installation. The structure of a building, its ventilation, its heating, its sanitation, its lighting, as well as every manner of equipment that goes into its construction, all reflect [society’s] level of scientific and technological progress and in turn affect [the structure’s] architectural style. The design of the recently completed Beijing Workers’ Stadium (a structure built to accommodate 15,000 people), for example, employs new structural techniques alongside optimized ventilation and lighting systems, marking our advancements in science and technology as they relate to architecture practice. Clearly, these innovations play a crucial role in the overall effect of the building.

4. 4 Living habits: Our vast land is home to 650 million people, and as a multiethnic country, it is host to different customs and habits. Not only do ethnic minorities each have their own historical traditions and customs, which influence their unique architectural styles (for example Tibetan, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolian architecture), but even within the Han-majority regions, there are notable differences, especially between northern and southern architecture. At the same time, these living habits are gradually changing with the advancement of the country’s productive forces and its continued progress in construction, both of which inexorably affect architectural style as well.

In conclusion, the factors mentioned above all bear influence [on architectural style], varying in degree based on the nature and specific conditions of the architectural object. Architecture is a product of human labor and is therefore inherently social. Architectural style comprises part of the superstructure that in turn rests on the base, and therefore undergoes constant change in accordance with the development of social production. Within a given social system and at a particular historical stage, a general architectural style will naturally materialize, marked by distinct characteristics. Indeed, architectural style is not represented by the elements of a few individual buildings but rather by those shared characteristics. Its formation requires a process. It cannot be produced overnight. We socialist architects believe that through continued scientific study, architectural design theory will no doubt continue to advance, providing ever better conditions for future architectural creation.

Commentary: author, architect, and the socialist future

Samuel Hellmann

These two texts, written either side of the Great Leap Forward (hereafter GLF), show the theorization of economy and socialist life from a different perspective, that of the specialist, and moreover one operating within a discipline that perhaps more than any other could lay claim to doing the concrete work of “socialist construction”: architecture.

These two texts centrally concern themselves with what it means to be an architect and what it means to design. The modern discipline of architecture emerged in the fifteenth century when Renaissance builders like Antonio da Sangallo borrowed from their reading of Vitruvius the practice of drawing building plans directly on the ground to guide construction.Footnote ⁹ This material intervention slowly evolved through a series of abstractions, transmuting the plan from a physical reality to an a prori image, an abstraction motivated by relations of transaction between design firms and capitalists. But this transactional relationship had a political history too. Architecture as the science of an anticipated construction image had to separate itself from the coeval science of engineering, which from its earliest days had been the task of the same designer responsible for the building plan. It was not until the French Revolution equipped architects with the conceptual tools for thinking their labor as a self-contained science and formal design language (while also providing the material conditions wherein this separation abetted the utopian and developmental goals of the Republican state) that this separation was fully accomplished.Footnote ¹⁰ The Chinese Revolution was similarly a rupture that challenged the theoretical and organizational structure of design work, one that provided a new political vocabulary to Western-trained Chinese architects disillusioned with the circumscribed role of architecture under the dictates of private capital.

This chance to carve out a new disciplinary boundary for architecture is likely what kept professionals and fellow travelers like Yang Tingbao enthusiastic participants in the emancipatory project of Chinese socialism. Perhaps the most prolific Chinese architect of the twentieth century, Yang trained in the United States alongside Liang Sicheng under the beaux arts paragon Paul Cret, before gaining prominence in the Republican period as a cofounder of the influential firm, Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects, which designed much of Shanghai’s early consumer sector.Footnote ¹¹ He worked heavily in Nanjing, the Republican capital, and his modernist designs for key public and infrastructural projects (notably railway stations and hospitals) demonstrated his ability to work beyond the commercialized/Americanized beaux arts idiom in which he was trained.Footnote ¹² His writings showed a fondness for modernist auteurs, some of whom he knew personally (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn), as well as the practical and prefabricated work of the Tennessee Valley Authority.Footnote ¹³ This modernist sensibility and proficiency, as well as his international and national fame, led to his being named president of the Architectural Society of China and chairman of Nanjing University’s architectural department.Footnote ¹⁴ These positions allowed Yang to engage with construction academically, defining architecture for a new generation of designers trained endogenously within the post-revolution institutions. At the same time, Yang was elected a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, an advisory body providing consultation on the state’s development projects alongside Soviet advisers. Soviet loans and expertise were crucial to the construction of a new economy in the early PRC, and they brought with them a utopian emphasis on central planning as both an expedient means of rapid industrialization and a radical method for building a new landscape that would itself affect new, egalitarian social relations. For architects well acquainted with the social relations of the capitalist environment (and architecture’s meager role in merely facilitating them rather than affecting them), the political consensus around a central plan elicited immense excitement.Footnote ¹⁵

Beijing was the first city subjected to such a massive, centrally planned overhaul. Within this plan, the government turned to Yang to design important structures indicative of the new economy, namely the first socialist department store and a hotel to house international delegates of the 1952 Asia–Pacific Peace Conference. However, as typologies of the ancien régime, Yang’s designs for these two buildings had to prove both the tenability of these forms (department stores and hotels) and the dynamics they facilitated (transaction, circulation, feedback, and so on) within the new, if abstract, system of socialist economics, while at the same time negating the unequal social relations that arise from these forms and these dynamics under capitalism. This problematic defined architecture in the late 1950s and onward, inspiring fierce debate around the nature of socialist design, especially once a break with the Soviet Union became imminent.Footnote ¹⁶ Chinese architects were tasked by the state bureaucracy with charting a national design that was both characteristically modern and Chinese.Footnote ¹⁷ This assignment instantiated a whole host of epistemological problems concerning the nature of design labor and aesthetics under socialism. Having withstood the critiques of the mid- to late 1950s (critiques which largely sidelined the major figures of that Beijing plan, namely Liang Sicheng, Leon Hoa, and Chen Zhanxiang), the field looked to Yang to articulate an approach to the task of socialist design.Footnote ¹⁸ These two texts proved crucial for the profession’s attempt to define the parameters of socialist architecture, first by synthesizing the preceding missteps and second by redefining socialist style as a practical and dynamic approach to composition (with an eye toward the social relationships that composition facilitates), rather than a set of stylistic signifiers or cultural ornaments.

As Yang repeats across these two texts, the central committee’s principles of “function, economy, and as much attention to beauty as conditions allow” were not merely a government mandate; they were also a loose and therefore potentially useful tool for orienting design and mediating these tensions between the past, present, and future of socialist construction. Through Yang’s writings, we see considerable effort to nuance these precepts and move architecture away from a simplistic understanding that would reduce design to its most quantitative metrics, a reduction that shirked the radical opening of defining and building a socialist environment out of fear of critique. Design that hedged (in the sense of avoiding loss both to the architect’s standing and to the state’s resources) by maximizing indicators of cost-effectiveness was “one-sided” economical thinking. Yang makes clear the gravity of one-sided thinking in that it does not merely downplay or ignore the other two components of the central committee’s dictum; rather, it relies on the conceptualization (common within socialist realism) of function as self-evident and beauty as completely dispensable. Yet in the same way as socialist realism was not really real (but rather fantastical and ideological), functional idioms like Stalinist classicism or Chinese beaux arts design were not really functional. If these buildings were neither substantively nor aesthetically functional to socialist life, then they were not truly economical. They were instead “a total waste of state resources.”Footnote ¹⁹

For Yang, designing for “economy” meant attuning architecture to the present needs of the not-yet-socialist economy while also ensuring that any structure built to address the present reality would outlast it and continue to provide a utility in the rapidly changing future. Yang clearly thought that this unique temporality necessitated a new attitude toward design labor, and it is here that we find Yang’s proposal to think architectural work as a kind of authorial production. The idea of an autonomous genius is no doubt a pervasive myth within conventional histories of architecture.Footnote ²⁰ However, Yang attempts to sublate this capitalist archetype by generalizing the freedom accorded to so-called “big-name architects” to the mass of socialist designers as a potential way to redefine their work against the new economy and attendant new modes of life and labor that it made possible. He attempts this universalization first by way of metaphor to an actually existing kind of labor with similar degrees of creative freedom, writing; and second by locating the unfreedom of architectural labor in the studio system. These two moves, while somewhat under-formulated, nevertheless point to an innovative and critical mediation on which labor patterns could and should be borrowed from capitalism to meet the needs of socialism.

For Yang, the idea of an autonomous socialist architect was a more flexible agent than the routinized studio, itself a clientelist formation resulting from private ownership of capital. Yang saw attempts to simply optimize this relationship via Fordist production methods as ultimately self-defeating: “The [design] process demands not only extensive knowledge but also the continuous, reciprocal application of that knowledge to address challenges that emerge at every stage of design and implementation.”Footnote ²¹ In other words, in architecture, the assembly line is simply less productive. More importantly, this push toward rationalization was unsuited to the demands of a new life. In the same way as socialist life was open-ended following the (nominal) dismantling of hierarchies of production, the spaces encompassing that life would also need to be fluid, and their production had to reflect this fluidity. Yang’s time in American design firms had acquainted him with the rigidity of the studio–client system, as it had with the abstracted relations that propelled it.Footnote ²² In private development, architects do not actually sell a building to a client (much less to its eventual inhabitants). Instead, they traffic in and advertise design media, qua circulating commodities in the flat planes of paper knowledge: plans, sections, and elevations. Born of crisis, this self-abstraction, or “self-commercialization,” on the part of Western architecture functioned to carve out a use case for the profession amid the transition to capitalism, relegating design to the role of providing the ideological framing of the capitalist city.Footnote ²³

Yang worried that the socialist organization of design bureaus had too willingly accepted this abstraction via its reliance on the studio, forcing architects to labor solely “at the drawing board.”Footnote ²⁴ They, like the architect in service of capital, remained in the realm of media, providing the preliminary ideological dimension of a structure, which construction units would ultimately bring into being. The plan was thus merely a representation, one that precluded mediation by the materiality of construction and the life of the socialist economy, or in other words, a labor fundamentally distanced from the production of use values under the new system.

Yang’s proposal to think architecture as authorial production is said almost in passing, referencing a need for accountability (and credit), but its appearance as the very final corrective for post-liberation architecture imbues it with a conclusory sense, one that is not only implied, but emphasized when he surmises that “we must go a step further in giving the chief authors of architectural designs adequate working conditions and environments.”Footnote ²⁵ The word here is literally “writer” (zuozhe 作者), and it is deployed to stress the creative faculty of architectural labor. However, it is deliberately somewhat ambiguous whether this “author” description is a metaphor or a literal imposition. This ambiguity, and its placement following his final suggestion regarding individual accountability, invite us to extend the category beyond what Yang’s text explicitly renders. If we are to generatively read this concept in light of Yang’s other suggestions and critiques, what, then, might it mean to think of the architect as author? To answer this question, we have to understand the existing conceptualizations of authorial labor available to Yang in the pre- and post-GLF moments.

Perhaps the most consonant with Yang’s articulation is Mao’s notion of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuo zhe 文艺工作者), outlined in the famous 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum of Literature and Art.” This text and its figure of the “culture worker” occupied an important place within the discipline of architecture, a position reflective of wider discussions on cultural production during the GLF. The field of writing, for instance, saw attempts to construct a “factory of literature,” in harmony with the overarching social push towards economies of scale and rapid accumulation.Footnote ²⁶ In that moment, the Stalinist conceptualization of the socialist writer as the “engineer of the human soul” took precedence over earlier Maoist formulations.Footnote ²⁷ However, with the failures of the GLF and the rising tensions between China and the Soviet Union, this notion underwent critique. Yang was not unique in cautiously connecting architecture to cultural work, but by the late 1950s this connection had become an explicit focus within the field. In 1959, the Architectural Society hosted the Shanghai Forum on Issues of Residential Design Standards and Architectural Art, itself a nod to the Yan’an Forum. In the one address, Liang Sicheng admitted to being the “chief culprit” of revivalism, and attempted to articulate a dialectical conception of function, economy, and beauty in order to rectify his mistakes and expand and transform the purview of design labor beyond the “eclecticism” of bourgeois architecture that he had perpetuated.Footnote ²⁸ Other participants of the forum, such as Wu Liangyong and Wang Tan, more explicitly forwarded the concept of the culture worker as a new guidepost for the discipline. Quoting Mao’s “Talks,” Wu and Wang argued for a new vision of design labor as a synthetic, transformative set of practices based in a mediation of design history, economic possibility, and the futurity of socialist life, going so far as to counterpose the historical figure of the capitalist architect (zibenzhuyi de jianzhushi 资本主义的建筑师) to the future, socialist figure of the “advanced design worker” (fahui sheji gongzuozhe 发挥设计工作者), with the difference between the two resting in a process of “self-transformation” (ziwo gaizao de guozheng 自我改造的过程).Footnote ²⁹

Yang was president of the society in 1959, and he also presented at this forum. The contemporaneous pieces translated here invite us to examine the possibility of design as a form of culture work, in a Maoist idiom. In Yang’s prescription for a transformative process of constructing socialist style through the combined, yet individuated, work of designers, the architect-as-author conception could similarly be seen as providing a subjective ground wherein the formal system of design would meet real spatial conditions typically outside the purview of architecture. The mediation of the two via a plan crafted from the mind and life of the architect could then project the potentiality of a new life, while itself reproducing less-alienated modes of labor and life in its becoming. This dialectic explains Yang’s insistence on both “vigorous scientific study” and conforming to “material conditions” of a project (correlative to the two strata brought together by Mao’s culture worker, i.e. Marxism as an intellectual system and space as a real place of labor and relationality). This dialectic also explains Yang’s assertion that the socialist architect has to move between these two registers freely. The process of the coming together of the rational system and the concrete spaces of life would sublate the architect who undergoes it, and the resultant object would create the conditions for a life that is not yet thinkable prior to this “process.”

This symmetry is, of course, a somewhat generous reading of a design professional like Yang. However, it is a symmetry that nonetheless points us to a possible radical rethinking of architecture that emerged within this revolutionary context. These two texts clearly lack the revolutionary thrust and commitment of someone directly responsible for bringing about the revolution. Yet, despite the potentially flaccid nature of his prescriptions, Yang nevertheless shows us a political possibility in thinking through practical limits, especially when those limits are so far removed from our own. For instance, Yang’s attempts to find material for possible new articulations and conceptual understandings of construction that could point to an emergent Chinese “style” were motivated in part by the inability (in terms of both adequate education and material) to formulate and construct a new national style wholesale. Yang emphasizes the subjective nature of architecture that is both absent in one-sided economic thinking and implicit (if not antagonistically mobilized) in capitalist development.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, any architectural object is ideologically structured, and this ideological component cannot be manufactured out by dispersing responsibilities among the mass of professionals. This impression is sensorial but not merely visual; his examples point to climate, topography, and historical experience, underscoring architecture’s role in structuring the conscious and unconscious patterns of life in space. By mediating the rational and the aggregate “effect” (xiaoguo 效果) with the subjective and experiential “impression” (yinxiang 印象), the contingency that is the cognition and labor of the individual author could facilitate patterns of an undetermined future life, bounded only by the nonnegotiable political orientation (or “stance,” lichang 立场, in Mao’s text) of socialist culture work.Footnote ³¹ Alongside Yang’s praise of generative critique, his retelling of the history of various formalisms and revivalisms (whereby each results from a critique of the previous episteme, solving some problems and revealing new ones), is thus a political methodology aimed at assessing and guiding construction in the present. Namely, bringing these contingencies back to the collective of culture workers allows for their continued revaluation and rearticulation as the economy and the field of architecture progress and the future life comes into view.

Like style, “beauty” can also be read generously as an immanent category mobilized by Yang to signal a radical politics of architecture in service of socialist life (one similarly made possible by the underlying economics that revolutionary architecture found itself in and needing to authentically express). His chief aesthetic category is “as much attention to beauty as conditions allow,” but he is quick to distance these “conditions” from purely economic or formal ones. Rather, “conditions” here can be taken as temporal conditions: as much attention to beauty as can be actualized here and now, and as much attention to socialist beauty as can be conceived from within the not-yet-socialist present. We can see this temporalizing in Yang’s critique of form. Architects are liable to take form as an inbuilt characteristic of a structure, an essence whose overall articulation can be distilled by aggregating characteristics of multiple structures. Yang, however, was keen to realize that what appears to us as formal patterns is, in reality, the historical residue of modes of living to which we do not have direct epistemological access.

The Hundred Flowers campaign (1956) opened with an impassioned critique of “revivalism” in the issues of the Architectural Journal (Jiazhu Xuebao 建筑学报). Architects such as Bao Ding and Zhou Buyi recounted the uncritical pursuit of classicism as a specific response to “formalism,” which in the Chinese case was largely taken as a stand-in for the international work of the Western avant-garde.Footnote ³² In contradistinction, Yang does not counterpose the two trends; instead, he links them as mutual endpoints of a singular type of one-sided, economistic thinking—different but ultimately equal symptoms of the overall lack of imagination. If we link this conflation with Yang’s critique of revivalism as the result of aggregating techniques across distinct historical periods and structures to form a glossary of stylistic components that can be (ir)rationally reduplicated, we see how revivalism is indeed a kind of formalism. That is, nothing was truly “revived” in revivalism; rather, fetishistic characteristics were accreted into an abstract form. From our own position outside the economic practicality of Yang’s writing, we can take this critique even further to say that it was a logic of capital that allowed for the thinking of design as an aggregation of abstract forms gleaned from disparate structures. Indeed, form is not inherent to a structure; rather it is an epistemological category, one reinforced by the tools and methods of architecture that evolved from the Enlightenment through to the beaux arts system of training that largely informed modern Chinese architecture.Footnote ³³ This conception of form reached a zenith under capital wherein beauty and function are counterposed as antitheses. In other words, classical style is viewed as beautiful because it is nonfunctional, superfluous, and ornamental. In reality, however, classical architecture is not nonfunctional; rather, it is anachronistic; it is nonfunctional to the current historical moment because of the underlying economics of capital and capital’s own conceptual understanding of function. In its own time, however, classical design not only was not “classical,” but also served a function to the political-economic reality, and in turn enabled the reproduction of that society.

Yang clearly was aware of this limit, not only in his desire to move to a new system of architectural labor, but also in his insistence that beauty not be thought of as a characteristic of form, but as a function of arrangement. Yang wanted to radically expand architecture’s conceptual reach beyond the singularity of one design to encompass “city and residential planning.”Footnote ³⁴ The combined effect of the central plan and its constituent ensemble of unreified structures bearing witness to the life of their inhabitants creates a qualitatively different urban fabric, one whose visual and embodied consonance is aesthetically experienced as beauty. The beauty of the socialist city is not in its formal coherence compared to capitalist cities, but in the way that it enables life, from the individual to the way individuals are spatially related, from the micro-scale of their daily labor and circulation to the way those rubrics of relation (which center the worker) inflect the macro-scale of the skyline. The beauty is, then, a result both of breathing that life into the built environment and of inhabiting an urban fabric that at every point bears witness to the needs of the inhabitant.

In this regard, Yang aimed to underscore “attention to beauty” as policy, while signaling that beauty could be redefined. This redefinition explains Yang’s purposefully vague assertion that “architecture in a class society always reflects the character of class.” This proclamation seems to suggest that architecture, borne of a particular context, tautologically reflects features of that context—that within the class system of capitalism, architectural styles and forms are apparent through a vocabulary of class characteristics. However, if we read Yang sympathetically, if we look beyond economics as a reified system, and if we take seriously the real lives of Chinese socialism (the useful forms it sought to produce under different patterns of labor and production), we can see that Yang might have pointed to a different meaning: architecture in a class society always reflects the meaning of characteristics themselves to the dominant class, and the goals of a classless society must reflect a much-expanded conceptual accounting of fundamental characteristics in architecture, such as form, function, economy, and beauty. From our current position in the twenty-first century, we find architecture once again content to occupy the position of ideological framing—transparently proffering the dream of technological progress, efficiency, and total development—we know whose progress and what it serves: the never-ending last gasp of bourgeois domination, deregulated development, uncontrolled rent, violent colonization, and ecological catastrophe. Turning to a different social and economic organization of life has thus never been more important, if nothing else, to save architecture from itself.