How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979

As we open How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 this week in our Main Galleries, we reflect on the relationships between ideology, policy, and the built environment. Uncovering these and documenting the role that architects play both in advancing and challenging them is at the core of much of our work at the CCA. Many of our recent projects emphasize how architecture is not only inextricably linked to its social context, but also to the economic and political forces that shape the evolution of our societies. Today, for instance, conservative and authoritarian governments around the world seek legitimization by promoting an architectural grandeur based on their political ideologies. In doing so, they also aim to reverse the impacts of progressive policies that privileged the transparency and rationality of different expressions of modernism in the twentieth century.

One of our ongoing interests focuses on revisiting the fruitful migration and appropriation of architectural ideas, technologies, and knowledge around the world in what Esra Akcan calls “translation movements.” We have approached this work in many ways, for example in Casablanca Chandigarh in 2013, curated by Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato. Featuring photographic missions by Yto Barrada and Takashi Homma, this exhibition and book documented how the global export of twentieth-century Euro-American modernism shaped the realities of everyday life in these two cities. More recently, Jean-Louis Cohen’s project Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020) revealed how idealized representations of the United States—whether aspirational or antagonizing—shaped Russian approaches to design in the twentieth century. And we continue to explore architectural developments in post-independence African countries through programs like our ongoing CCA c/o Dakar program and other collaborations that stem from the 2019–2023 Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program “Centring Africa: Post-Colonial Perspectives on Architecture.”

How Modern, produced in collaboration with M+ in Hong Kong and curated by Shirley Surya, Curator of Architecture and Design at M+, responds to our curiosity in producing new readings of modern architecture across different sociopolitical contexts and geographical frameworks. Our encounter with Shirley’s research on how diverse articulations—but also rejections—of modern architecture were formative in the construction of the People’s Republic of China and the lives of its citizens offered us the opportunity to expand our perspective on North-South and East-West knowledge divides. It also allowed us to continue questioning the agency held by architects, planners, and residents in shaping the built environment. This week’s article, “Function, economy, and (when possible) beauty” presents excerpts from the accompanying publication (CCA/M BOOKS), co-edited by Shirley with Li Hua, Professor of Architectural History at Southeast University, Nanjing, which outline assumptions about architecture’s role in the development of socialist modernity in New China.

Our interest in modernism’s global reach goes beyond questions of history and style to investigate its social impact, especially how its ideas frame contemporary ways of living and thinking. Together with M+, we commissioned artist Wang Tuo to put lived histories at the centre of How Modern. In Intensity in Ten Cities, a corpus of films and oral histories, he captures key sites of modern architecture across China—an apartment building, a university auditorium, a public park, among others—as they continue to be used and experienced today, weaving the long legacies of the period in a fictional narrative about love and politics.

How Modern was also conceived as a test: an institutional collaboration combining expertise and resources in Hong Kong and Canada. We are convinced that this project would not have been possible if we had worked alone and thank M+ for this opportunity. In a world in which open dialogues are becoming more difficult to maintain, and in which organizations are becoming more closed-in, this kind of collaboration exemplifies the possibility of building new narratives together.

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