PLATFORM: China’s Architecture and/as Globalization

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Recent shifts in Sino-American relations and declarations of globalization’s end have prompted me to revisit understandings of the term and its implications for contemporary Chinese architecture. As a historian of modern Chinese architecture and urbanism, I am particularly interested in locating globalization’s origins in relation to architecture and, above all, in China’s catalytic role in what we could call globalization’s production.

For many scholars, including the economist Dani Rodrik, the “hyper-globalization” that emerged during the late 1990s through late 2000s is at the origin of contemporary conditions. Social scientists such as Xuefei Ren, Ching Kwan Lee, and Jerry Zee have helped to delineate the distinctly global contours of China’s architectural, infrastructural, and atmospheric production over the past forty years—economic and spatial expansion also informed by capitalism’s reach around the world and the concurrent collapse of global socialism and our planet’s environment.

I have been interested in how early reform-era design was significant to China’s rise as a crucible of globalized architecture, even before the hyper-globalized 1990s. The challenging collaborative design methods that begat reform-era architecture, the complicated international financing and ideological rationalizations required for its realization, and, perhaps most importantly, the symmetries between so-called capitalist and socialist systems that such work both exposed and facilitated over time were all central to the era’s production of a distinctly globalized architecture, prior to the heady period more commonly identified with globalization.

Texts such as the April 1989 publication of Chinese Architecture: Criticism, Analysis, and Prospects (Zhongguo jianzhu: pingxi yu zhanwang), edited by Chinese architects and educators Gu Mengchao and Zhang Zaiyuan, capture the fluid, uncertain forces at play during the time. Gu and Zhang’s book was a new and novel contribution to Chinese architectural discourse—an effort to produce what its editors described as an “open-door,” or kaifang, collection of reflections on the changes rippling through China as it liberalized its economy.

Several qualities distinguished the book from much of China’s architectural scholarship at the time. Its lack of definitive conclusions, for example, was designed to encourage rather than close debate. In their preface, Gu and Zhang also anticipated that their volume’s engagement with a number of “forbidden” and “sensitive” issues––the perceived value of still-controversial imperial-era architectural and urban planning practices, the legacy of Mao-era architecture, and the significance of reform itself, among others––was likely to trigger controversy.

The book arrived at a turbulent time amid China’s decade-long effort at Opening and Reform (gaige kaifang). This unpredictable campaign was initiated in 1978 in the name of liberalizing China’s economy and improving people’s living standards. It exposed the country to an exciting, unprecedented flood of new ideas, objects, and experiences; it also destabilized lives, environments, and a society already shaken by the Cultural Revolution. The ideological struggle over the country’s direction divided both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership and the public at large.

With rampant inflation fueling social unrest around the country, tensions culminated in unprecedented violence following the government’s decision to open fire on protestors in Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989.

In their preface, the editors Gu and Zhang acknowledged challenges reverberating not only through China but around the world: growing fears over resource scarcity, the need for more ecologically sensitive design methods, more comprehensive urban planning strategies attuned to China’s rich city-building traditions, and the country’s own frustrated search for localized, culturally specific forms of architectural expression in an age of increasingly international engagement and exchange. “The energy crisis, the environmental crisis, and the ecological crisis… a variety of crises have left architecture within much of the developed world at a crossroads,” noted Gu and Zhang. “So it is with Chinese architecture,” explained the editors.

The volume’s international, multigenerational group of contributors was also notable—an array of active, discursively engaged Chinese designers and thinkers, including Yung Ho Chang, Cheng Taining, and Wang Mingxian as well as influential foreign voices such as American architect John Portman, Japanese architect Yoshinobu Ashihara and Hong Kong designer Chung Wah Nan. Nearly all of the volume’s forty-seven contributors reflected upon architecture’s role in mediating the party’s fluctuating ideological positions in relationship to China’s own history and the world at large at a moment of unprecedented openness.

Numerous essays referenced the country’s nascent efforts toward architectural conservation. Others reassessed possible benefits of market-oriented economics by considering recently built, much celebrated projects such as Shanghai’s Longbai Hotel and Shanghai Centre, and the Lhasa Hotel in Tibet. (Figure 1) Several texts also acknowledged the need for new design methods poised between Chinese and international practices. “If my country’s economy needs to accede to ‘international cycles,’ then its architecture production must not close itself off to international exchange,” concluded Xu Anzhi in a historical comparison of University of Pennsylvania graduates Liang Sicheng and Louis Kahn.

Figure 1: Zhang Yaozeng, Huadong Architectural Institute of Design, Longbai Hotel, Shanghai, 1982 (Courtesy East China Architectural Design & Research Institute, Co., Ltd)

Gu and Zhang’s volume takes on new resonance in light of the country’s shifting relationship to the world today. Amid current anxieties concerning the future of globalization, I’m struck by its architectural past, and the enthusiastic, if somewhat anxious, willingness of these contributors to situate China within a broader global context and reflect on the promises and challenges posed by increased global connectivity to Chinese architecture and our planet. In fact, many artists, writers, filmmakers, and architects capitalized upon the opportunities afforded by reform, absorbing information gleaned from international sources and working to apply them to the particular context of post-Mao China. These translations were often dismissed as accidental, overexuberant forms of “cultural fever” (wenhua re), but they spoke to the range of new questions, possibilities, and risks beginning to emerge.

Architecture may have been distinct from other cultural expressions, but it too absorbed new influences circulating throughout the country. The government imposed certain design-related constraints—the creation of joint-venture design partnerships, for example, and the government’s prioritization of advanced building technology—to ensure that key physical and symbolic aspects of China’s modernization were achieved. Otherwise, however, there were relatively few aesthetic or performative parameters consistently imposed with regards to what a reform-era architecture should look like, or how it would serve the interests of the state and its citizenry in a late-Cold War world poised for change.

By the end of the 1980s, it had become clear that neither officials nor architects had fully anticipated the ways in which such uncertain alignments, reified through an international hotel, trade center, or even an electric power company headquarters, might, in one instance, monumentalize the party’s achievement, or in another, inadvertently incite public debate, thereby exposing the underlying inconsistencies at the heart of reform (Figure 2).

Figure 2: P&T Group, Jinling Hotel, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 1983 (author’s collection)

These stimulating, unstable conditions remain significant today but have been largely obscured, in architectural terms, by what followed. It was in response to the political lessons of the 1980s that the party continued to pursue intensified economic liberalization, comprehensive land reforms, housing marketization, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises through the 1990s and 2000s. These transformations all helped to fuel a second wave of reform-era architecture consisting of exceedingly large, increasingly refined objects of transnational architectural production – monuments to the kind of hyper-globalization documented by Rodrik and others. These works demonstrated China’s more confident embrace of market-based economic liberalization, as well as the eagerness of multinational architectural corporations and Chinese design institutes to translate the energy and capital resulting from a globalizing China into physical form (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, 1999 (photo by author)

Such work, in turn, generated access to financing and clients that helped fuel the rise of a first generation of so-called private, experimental architectural practices, including Yung Ho Chang, Wang Shu, Liu Jiakun, and others (Figure 4). It is to these figures that international critics, curators, and juries typically turn when searching for sources of China’s contemporary architectural culture. This culture has more recently been framed as representing a new era of “critical pragmatism” that has been continued through the work of designers such as Zhu Pei of Studio Zhu Pei, Xu Tiantian of DnA Design and Architecture, Zhang Ke of ZAO/standardarchitecture, and Vector Architects, among others. Their efforts have indeed helped to sharpen and deepen the contextual, material, and atmospheric scope of architectural meaning in China by grounding contemporary architectural expression within what the Museum of Modern Art identifies as “the country’s unique cultural context” (Figure 5).

Figure 4: Jiakun Architects, West Village, Chengdu, Sichuan, 2015. (Photography, Arch-Exist; Copyright Jiakun Architects)

Figure 5: Xu Tiantian/DnA Design and Architecture, Quarry #9, Jinyun County, Zhejiang, 2022 (Courtesy DnA Architecture)

Yet, one cannot help but reconsider such work and its curatorial framing in light of China’s increasingly complex relationship to the world, particularly at what could be a decisive turning point in that relationship. Such architecture may be both pragmatic and distinctive as a creative representation of contemporary China, but what does it reveal with regards to the broader reimaging of global China currently underway?

As thoughtful and restrained as such work may appear, I propose it neatly elides the forty-five years of jarring, often contradictory economic messaging, political machinations, and cultural production that enabled it. Presented as a corrective to thirty years of reform-era architectural precedent, and in aesthetic and material terms deemed palatable by global taste-makers, this particular vein of contemporary Chinese architecture seems self-isolated from the conspicuous material prosperity wrought by China’s decades-long engagement with capitalism and the fragmentary, alienating effects of economic liberalization itself. Its mythic reimagining of the more rural contexts and practices of China’s past ignores the daunting challenges present in China’s cities and, and more importantly, the country’s consequential imprint on global architectural production at large.

In this respect, one cannot help but sense the chilling effects of President Xi’s 2014 condemnation of “weird” architecture, which still reverberates throughout the discipline, as well as an all too convenient alignment with the government’s rural revitalization campaign in ways that risk ensnarement within a rising nationalism that increasingly permeates all aspects of Chinese society. Such a narrowing of architectural meaning in China also potentially enables the imposition of the state’s increasingly aggressive moral vision upon the lives of its citizens—and, increasingly, the world at large.

Amid the architectural discipline’s ongoing reckoning with its own contributions to climate change, authoritarianism, and China’s infrastructural vision for a new world order, there is both urgency and value in reassessing the historical perspective afforded by early reform-era Chinese architecture. What might it offer as a way for considering Chinese architecture today? Such efforts help in expanding our understanding of Chinese architecture as a distinctly global phenomenon while calling into question the notion that some unique Chinese cultural context exists, or that a singular Chinese architectural expression is desirable. It reveals a much more heterogeneous array of Chinese architectural meanings rooted in a complicated and varied genealogy—a tangle of multiple, occasionally incompatible truths from eclectic and pluralistic sources, including the government, that remain foundational to our current world.

These tangled architectural histories help to trace the origins of today’s current crises, including globalization, to important if as-yet unexamined contributions made by numerous architects, buildings, and processes of design and construction in establishing, testing, and expanding China’s global reach and influence. Acknowledging the importance and influence of perceived mistranslations of foreign theory in China as valid, global sources of meaning unto themselves may form part of this work.

New histories of current global design practices might consider China’s own universities as influential training grounds for Chinese and foreign architects. Its design institutes have long figured as contributors to global architectural culture, both inside and outside China, through the production of sports stadiums, parliament buildings, libraries, museums, housing projects, and large-scale infrastructural works that are transforming lives, institutions, and environments, for better or worse, around the world (Figure 6). At the same time, many of the world’s major international design firms have worked in China for the past forty-five years, becoming more “Chinese” than foreign in terms of where their work is located, the composition of their staff, and their major revenue sources.

“Amid the architectural discipline’s ongoing reckoning with its own contributions to climate change, authoritarianism, and China’s infrastructural vision for a new world order, there is both urgency and value in reassessing the historical perspective afforded by early reform-era Chinese architecture.”

Reckoning with China’s status as both the world’s largest consumer and producer of cement, steel, glass, and plastic, is key. So, too, is understanding that much of the country’s built environment is blanketed with surveillance cameras aimed at controlling people’s behavior, or the links between China’s current housing crisis and its one child policy. And that government-run detention facilities in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region number among the largest, most densely populated carceral architecture in the world.

Ultimately, the new architectural histories that might yet emanate from these questions need to grapple with the forgotten contortions at work in the architectural acts that induced China’s reforms and the globalization that followed. They remain important to the geopolitics currently roiling our planet, whether in relation to COVID-19, climate change, global economic performance, or the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Architecture has helped to make China a vital part of how we understand globalization, but there is much that we do not yet know. This history is also foundational to how we begin to address what comes next.

I am grateful to my colleagues Sony Devabhaktuni and Zhu Tao for their helpful comments on this essay.

Citation

Cole Roskam, "China's Architecture and/as Globalization," PLATFORM, October 17, 2022.