Running between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, Chang'an Avenue forms an east-west axis that cuts across the capital Beijing and features many of the most symbolic and significant architectural works of modern China. Shuishan Yu combines the approaches of urban, cultural, and architectural histories to offer a rich analysis of the planning and construction of the avenue and its most definitive spaces and structures. This approach offers an effective lens for understanding the changing roles of socialist ideology, artistic creation, nationalism, and globalization in modernization in China. Yu argues that while PRC planners and architects waged heated battles over specific concepts, their underlying assumptions equating modernity with “modernization” ensured that the modern project was never considered complete. Just as planning on Chang'an Avenue constantly attempted to “fill in the gaps” created by earlier rounds of construction, China seemed perpetually to be catching up to changing definitions of being modern.
The book is organized with two big-picture, diachronic chapters bookending four chapters that mostly focus on particular decades. Chapter 1 provides an overview of change over the centuries. During the imperial era, Chang'an Avenue was not an uninterrupted axis across the city, but consisted of separate streets that did not exactly line up, with a much smaller T-shaped Tiananmen Square at the midpoint. Official buildings and closed sacred spaces were prominent, but there were humble businesses and dwellings along the road as well. While Republican-era governments (1912–49) opened some sites to the public, the most significant spatial changes occurred after 1949.
Chapter 2 describes debates in the 1950s over “national form” and the place of Chinese elements in “modern” and “socialist” architecture. Architect Liang Sicheng argued that distinctive features such as courtyards, roofs, and brackets formed a Chinese “grammar” that could serve as the basis of a creative modern architecture. But other architects criticized “national form” as not sufficiently new and “socialist.” Architects struggled to find an appropriate balance, but functional aspects came to be emphasized more than ornamentation. As debates raged, Chang'an Avenue, newly linked and widened to accommodate large national day parades, became a showcase. The public buildings and monuments constructed in the late 1950s, including the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Chinese Revolution and History, forged a “stylistic compromise” utilizing Soviet neoclassical elements along with muted Chinese decoration (p. 85).
The development of a collectivist method for planning and design in the 1960s is the focus of chapter 3. The municipal government asked architects and planners to create design schemes that would fill in “gaps,” creating more visual unity along the showcase boulevard. The government then convened a group discussion about all the plans. After receiving criticism from the group, individual institutions revised their plans, which over time increasingly resembled each other until a comprehensive plan could be agreed upon. Tsinghua University architects came up with a comprehensive plan in 1964, but the Cultural Revolution interrupted implementation.
Chapter 4 begins with the collective construction of the Chairman Mao Memorial in the late 1970s and ends with the return of individual design as hotels catering to foreigners were added to Chang'an Avenue in the 1980s. After the earlier emphasis on heavy, political architecture, architects seemed eager to adopt the assumed simplicity and lightness of international style. Ironically, as modernism became popular in China, prominent Western architects were already espousing localism in reaction against monotonous uniformity. Yu illustrates how debates over postmodernism in China contributed to the transformation of the “national forms” of earlier generations into flexible “cultural symbols” for the next.
With nationalism rising in the 1990s and 2000s, chapter 5 shows how Chinese elements figured prominently in many new structures, but often in fragmented ways. Chang'an Avenue turned into a grand “collage” of facades, represented most dramatically by the Grand National Theater (1998–2007). After a controversial competition utilizing discussion techniques of collective design, French firm ADP won with a “characterless” egg-shaped design (p. 228) that rekindled heated debate over how best to represent national desires on China's showcase avenue.
In a discussion of changing concepts of the axis in Chinese urban space, Yu describes how a new concern for historic preservation has led to the resurging significance of old sites along the imperial era's ceremonial north-south axis that Chang'an Avenue's “modern” axis had displaced, reminding readers how the effort to “fill in the gaps” continues. Overall, the book's arguments are effective when description of the design plans and buildings remains closely tied to the discussion of how architects practiced their profession and to the architectural debates of the period. Indeed, with the possible exception of a comparison to the avant-garde, the analyses stay well-grounded throughout. By enlarging our understanding of the contexts, contradictions, and consequences of choices made building Chang'an Avenue, Yu offers an effective multi-faceted view of changing modernity in Beijing.
