Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture: Chapter II

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Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture:
Chapter II: Between Silence and Search - Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture 1962–1979

George J. Ge

First conceived at the Royal College of Art in 2017,
Refined across Riyadh, London, Beijing and many long nights between 2018–2025

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954–1961
2.1 Architecture as Ideological Apparatus
2.2 Sovietisation and the Ten Great Buildings
2.3 Ghosts in the Grid
2.4 The City We Could Have Had: Beijing’s Lost Blueprint

3. Between Silence and Search: Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture 1962–1979
3.1 Liang Sicheng adn the Grammar of Tradition
3.2 I.M.Pei and the Third Way of Modernity
3.3 Between Form and Spirit: From Liang to Pei - Two Grammar Books of Chinese Modernity
3.4 Coda: Between Memory and Blueprint

4. Simulacra and Schism: Modernisation without Memory, 1980–1992
4.1 From Syntax to Schizophrenia
4.2 From Design to Directive: The Rise of Developmentalism
4.3 Borrowed Faces: Colonial Fantasies and the Patchworked City
4.4 From Confusion to Consciousness: The Quiet Reawakening of Chinese Architecture

5. Hesitations in the Fog: Chinese Architects Before the Olympics 1993–2007
5.1 Spectacles without Spectators: Imported Icons and Exiled Authors
5.2 In Search of Sincerity: The First Return to Site, Scale, and Soul
5.3 Waiting for the Microphone: A Discourage and A Mirror

6. Between Spectacle and Sincerity: The Reawakening of Chinese Architecture 2008–2016
6.1 Mockery in Stone: The Logic and Critique of Spectacularism
6.2 From Critique to Exploration: The Rise of Neo-Localism
6.3 Amateur Poetics: The Rise of New Culturalism
6.4 Calm in Concrete: Modified Modernists and Quiet Resistance
6.5 Between Two Fires: Urbanism and the Return of the Public

7. Light and Shadow in the Middle Decade 2017–2025
7.1 Between Festivals and Lockdowns: A Prelude
7.2 Plurality and the Golden Years
7.3 The Quiet Collapse: Pandemic and Real Estate Meltdown
7.4 Against Forgetting: Liu Jiakun and the Return of Humanity

8. Echoes and Embers: Toward a Personal Horizon
8.1 The Future of Architecture: What Kinds of Spaces Do We Still Need?
8.2 An Architect’s Migration: From London to Riyadh, from Drawing to Dwelling
8.3 Leave Blank: Gratitude and the Architecture of the Unsaid

3. Between Silence and Search: Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture 1962–1979

Red Guards burn a signboard bearing traditional calligraphy at a Confucian temple during the "Four Olds" campaign of China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The movement sought to eradicate "old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits," often through violent destruction of cultural heritage.

A crowd watches as the symbolic West Gate of Tsinghua University is defaced during the Cultural Revolution. Revolutionary fervor turned against even academic institutions, as students targeted architecture seen as vestiges of bourgeois or feudal culture.

Government-directed architectural ideology during the Cultural Revolution. This image shows a propaganda outlet titled "Proletarian Urban Planning Revolution" (Issue No. 1, 1966), calling for a complete rejection of “bourgeois” aesthetics such as solemnity, beauty, and modernisation in urban design.

The two decades between 1960 and 1980 form what might be called the silent wound in the history of Chinese architecture—not because nothing was built, but because so much was broken, including the very conditions that allow architecture to exist as a cultural discourse.

After the catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward, China plunged into three years of widespread famine that claimed tens of millions of lives. Fields went barren not for lack of rain, but for ideological delusion. Then, barely had recovery begun, came the Cultural Revolution—a decade-long political convulsion that dismantled not only institutions, but interior lives. Intellectuals were paraded in dunce caps, professors denounced by their students, and architecture schools converted into battlegrounds of class struggle. The language of architecture was expunged. No more “aesthetics.” No more “typology.” No more “vernacular.” Only “revolutionary spirit.” Only “mass line.”

But silence soon gave way to violence. Architecture was not just silenced—it was actively attacked. Under the banner of “Destroy the Four Olds” (破四旧), countless temples, ancestral halls, pagodas, and historic streets were vandalised or razed to the ground. Carved beams were burned as firewood, Buddha statues smashed by pickaxes, and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble in the name of revolution. In cities like Beijing, Xi’an, and Suzhou, centuries-old structures were labelled as “feudal remnants,” their destruction cheered by masses intoxicated with ideology.

The architectural damage was not incidental—it was intentional. Aimed at erasing the spatial memory of a “backward” past, it sought to purify not only the streets but the souls of those who walked them. And yet, what was shattered was more than bricks and mortar—it was the continuity of civilisation, the silent languages of craftsmanship, ritual, and place. What they smashed was not merely architecture—it was time itself.

As a child decades later, I sensed that silence. My history textbook spoke of victories, but never of ruins. I would hear the stories in fragments—whispered at dinner tables, recounted by weary voices. An aunt who was sent to the countryside. A grandfather who had to destroy his own books. A courtyard turned into a communal kitchen during the hunger years. These stories were not about architecture. Yet every one of them was about space—about how politics colonised the intimate geographies of memory, movement, and home.

Only after the frenzy subsided did the scale of the loss begin to surface. The gates once pulled down in anger would later be reconstructed in plywood for tourists. The stone lions once beheaded in triumph now guarded empty plazas. What was destroyed in a decade would take centuries to heal—if ever.

And yet, even in the ashes, the ember of thought endured.

By the mid-1970s, as the political winds began to shift, Architectural Journal cautiously reopened a space for intellectual inquiry. The 1975 editorial line—“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”—signalled a tentative revival. For the first time in decades, foreign projects were introduced in print, and words like “design” and “culture” began to reappear—not as threats, but as aspirations.

Still, one question loomed—unresolved, urgent, and painfully belated:
How do we modernise without erasing what little remains of ourselves?

This was not only an architectural dilemma—it was a cultural reckoning. And it is through this lens that we must revisit the figures of Liang Sicheng and I.M. Pei: not as heroic exceptions, but as architectural mediators—bridges suspended across the broken arc of a nation’s interrupted dream.

3.1 Liang Sicheng and the Grammar of Tradition

Liang Sicheng, 1955

Liang was taught at the Architecture department of Tsinghua University.

Liang’s project in 1959 with traditional Big Roof as a symbol

To speak of the modernisation of Chinese architecture without invoking Liang Sicheng would be like speaking of Chinese poetry without Li Bai. He is not merely a historical figure—he is an axis around which the struggle between tradition and modernity, memory and ambition, has long revolved.

Born into the late imperial elite, son of the reformist scholar Liang Qichao, Liang Sicheng carried within him a unique inheritance: a deep reverence for classical Chinese culture and a keen awareness of its precarious future. Educated first at Tsinghua and then at the University of Pennsylvania, Liang returned to China in the 1920s not as a romantic preservationist, but as a modernist in dialogue with the past. His goal was never to freeze tradition under glass, but to translate it—to find a living grammar within it.

This “grammar” became both metaphor and method. Working with Lin Huiyin and others, Liang travelled across China in the 1930s and ’40s, meticulously documenting wooden structures that had survived centuries of war, weather, and dynastic change. What he discovered was not simply a collection of buildings, but a syntax—a system of brackets, beams, and proportions that underpinned Chinese architecture like the rules of verse in classical poetry.

His writings, including annotated studies of the Yingzao Fashi and the first comprehensive History of Chinese Architecture, sought to codify these elements not for nostalgia, but for transmission. His drawings adopted Western architectural standards, with plans and sections, and were the first of their kind to record traditional Chinese architecture in such a methodical and systematic way—moving beyond oral tradition and apprenticeship. His History of Chinese Architecture became, in a sense, the Sir Banister Fletcher of China—a foundational text that bridged technical knowledge and cultural memory.

A drawing in Liang’s book, showing his research on traditional Chinese architecture.

Liang’s dream was to modernise Chinese architecture not by imitating the West, but by articulating a native system capable of contemporary expression.

Yet he was no mere academic. As a designer, Liang experimented with this vision in practice—especially in the early years of the People’s Republic. His work on buildings such as the China Art Gallery (1959) exemplified an attempt to synthesise traditional forms—pitched roofs, bracket sets, axial symmetry—with modern construction methods and programmatic requirements. It was an architectural Esperanto: legible to both past and present, East and West.

But it was also fragile.

By the 1950s, the Party’s vision for architecture tilted toward ideological spectacle. Liang’s pleas for preservation—of Beijing’s city walls, of traditional neighbourhoods, of cultural continuity—were dismissed as bourgeois sentimentality. Liang was silenced—but not forgotten. His writings continued to circulate in whispers and in photocopies, passed between students and young architects during the Cultural Revolution, when even to speak of fengshui was subversive. His grammar of tradition became a quiet resistance—a reminder that architecture could be more than concrete and command.

As the post-Mao thaw began in the late 1970s, Liang’s ideas regained urgency. China was modernising at breakneck speed, yet its architectural identity remained unformed, unguarded, and profoundly vulnerable. In that moment of uncertain transition, Liang re-emerged—not in person (he had passed away in 1972), but in principle: as a voice calling not to return, but to remember.

To remember that modernity need not mean amnesia.
To remember that roofs, columns, and courtyards are not just relics, but rhythms, proportions—and more importantly, life within.
To remember that architecture is not merely about new forms—but about choosing what not to destroy, and what to carry forward.

Liang did not give us a final answer.
He gave us a language with which to ask the question.

3.2 I.M. Pei and the Third Way of Modernity

I.M.Pei, 2011

Atrium of Xiangshan Hotel

Suzhou Museum, 2006

If Liang Sicheng gave us a grammar of tradition, I.M. Pei offered a new syntax—one that flowed not from inherited structures, but from lived contradictions.

Born in Suzhou in 1917, Pei spent his childhood wandering the gardens of Lion Grove, internalising a spatial language defined not by monumentality, but by rhythm, pause, and quiet narrative. At seventeen, he left China for the United States, where he studied at MIT and later at Harvard under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. There, he was baptised in modernism’s rational clarity and material discipline—an education that placed him at the very heart of the International Style’s ascendance.

And yet, Pei never fully belonged to either world. He was neither wholly Western nor simply Chinese. His modernism was tempered by memory, and his memory shaped by exile. In his own words, he often searched for “a third way”—a synthesis that could reconcile tradition and innovation, context and abstraction, without reducing either to stereotype.

That search would take on new urgency in the 1970s.

In 1974, Pei joined a delegation from the American Institute of Architects on a historic visit to China—his first return since leaving nearly four decades earlier. The nation he re-entered was no longer the one he had known. Ravaged by political purges and ideological rigidity, it was only just beginning to reopen to the world. And yet, amidst the ruins of cultural amnesia, Pei was invited to design a project: a state guesthouse nestled at the foot of Fragrant Hills (Xiangshan) in Beijing.

It became a turning point—not only in Pei’s career, but in the story of Chinese modernity.

Xiangshan Hotel, completed in 1982, was no mere building—it was a proposition. In a political climate still recovering from ideological trauma, Pei sidestepped the language of form and turned instead to the language of space. Rather than quote traditional symbols—brackets, dougong, tile eaves—he invoked their spatial logic: enclosure and release, framed views, layered thresholds. The result was not a Chinese pastiche draped in modern materials, but a spatial narrative that whispered of Suzhou gardens and Confucian axiality without ever naming them.

Xiangshan Hotel Plan

The central atrium, bathed in filtered light, recalled the Lion Grove of his youth. Circulation paths meandered like garden strolls, with shifting perspectives unfolding gently, resisting spectacle. At times, the sequence of space even evoked the landscapes of Southern Song scrolls—fluid, layered, and full of metaphor. Pei’s use of concrete was honest, almost ascetic, yet modulated by wood screens, stone textures, and a careful choreography of light and shadow. “The form is modern,” he later explained, “but the spirit is deeply Chinese.”

This, perhaps, was Pei’s most radical move: to define Chineseness not through ornament, but through spatial ethos.

Architectural critics soon recognised the subtlety of this gesture. An article in Architectural Journal hailed the project as a breakthrough—“while most architects are still exploring the traditional modernisation based on external forms, Pei reorients the discussion to spatial relationships as the dominant legacy of Chinese tradition.” In doing so, he reframed the conversation: modernity was no longer a question of visual identity, but of phenomenological continuity.

Pei’s approach stood in contrast to the emerging trends of the time. Many architects, eager to reclaim national identity after decades of suppression, resorted to literal revival—dragging traditional roofs onto concrete slabs, or pasting red columns onto steel frames. These “symbolic restorations” often resulted in hollow hybridities: neither fully modern nor authentically traditional. Pei’s refusal to decorate, to pander to either nationalism or nostalgia, was an act of architectural integrity.

But it was not without tension.

Some critics questioned whether his abstraction was too subtle—too easily misunderstood in a nation still rediscovering its cultural vocabulary. Others felt that his detached internationalism risked estrangement. Yet for a generation of younger architects, Xiangshan Hotel opened a new path: one that neither rejected tradition nor fetishised it, but translated it—quietly, rigorously, and poetically.

In the decades that followed, Pei’s influence continued to echo. His Suzhou Museum (2006) would revisit many of the same themes with greater clarity and confidence: light wells filtered through lattice; floating white walls framed by dark grey tile; a balance of stillness and narrative. If Xiangshan was a tentative first phrase, Suzhou was a full stanza.

Looking back, one sees in Pei not only an architect, but a mediator—between cultures, between ideologies, between epochs. His work reminds us that architectural modernity need not be a rupture. It can be, at its best, a continuity reimagined.

And in that reimagining, lies a form of resistance.

3.3 Between Form and Spirit: From Liang to Pei – Two Grammar Books of Chinese Modernity

An article reflecting on I.M. Pei’s design of the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing, discussing the challenges and aspirations of establishing a modern Chinese architectural identity. Published in Architectural Journal, the text captures a pivotal moment of re-engagement with global architectural discourse after the Cultural Revolution.

If Liang Sicheng gave us a grammar rooted in historical syntax—of beams and brackets, of measured proportions and inherited ritual—then I.M. Pei offered us a grammar of spirit: a grammar unspoken, sensed rather than seen, felt in voids and thresholds, in light filtered through silence.

Between these two grammars lies a generational debate, one that defined Chinese architectural discourse in the post-Mao era: How to modernise without severance? How to be Chinese without mimicry?

Liang’s answer was material and scholarly. He believed that the essence of Chinese architecture could be found in its structure—its dougong systems, axial symmetry, and tectonic clarity. Through rigorous study and preservation, he sought to establish a native modernism, one that carried forward the tangible DNA of traditional architecture. For Liang, “form” was not an aesthetic indulgence—it was a moral anchor, a vessel of cultural continuity. To abandon form was to lose the very grammar by which a civilisation could speak.

Pei, by contrast, began with a different assumption: that modernism was not necessarily at odds with tradition, but that tradition itself could evolve. While Liang looked to preserve and reinterpret inherited forms, Pei looked to embody inherited sensibilities. For him, the soul of Chinese architecture did not reside in the tiled roof or crimson pillar, but in how space was inhabited—how it revealed itself through time, sequence, and gesture. If Liang was a philologist decoding ancient scripts, Pei was a poet composing new verses in a familiar metre.

The distinction was not trivial.

In the architectural debates of the late 1970s and early ’80s—especially as Architectural Journal reopened its pages to intellectual exploration—two camps began to emerge. One continued Liang’s legacy, advocating for visible traditional motifs as anchors of identity. Another, inspired by Pei’s Xiangshan Hotel and similar projects, sought a deeper spatial translation: to modernise not by what was seen, but by how it was experienced.

This tension—between formal fidelity and spiritual resonance—animated much of the architectural experimentation in the 1980s and beyond. It can be seen in the works of later architects like Wu Liangyong, Zhang Kaiji, and the young generation returning from overseas studies. Their designs toggled between symbolic revivalism and abstract modernism, often uncertain where homage ended and invention began.

In this sense, both Liang and Pei left behind not styles, but questions:

Can form carry memory without becoming caricature?
Can spirit be preserved without losing identity?
And is it possible to design authentically, when authenticity itself is fractured by revolution and rupture?

These are not merely aesthetic questions—they are civilisational ones. For a nation emerging from trauma, eager to rebuild yet unsure what to carry forward, architecture became more than shelter or symbol. It became a mirror of cultural psyche.

Liang taught us to preserve.
Pei taught us to transform.
And between them, a generation of architects would search—sometimes hesitantly, sometimes boldly—for a new language. One not borrowed, nor merely revived, but born from a continuity reimagined.

3.4 Coda: Between Memory and Blueprint

From Liang Sicheng’s grammar of beams and brackets to I.M. Pei’s quiet syntax of space, a generation stood between ruin and rebirth, seeking not merely to build, but to remember how to build.

Their paths diverged—one in search of continuity, the other in search of transformation—but both asked the same question:
What does it mean to be modern, and still remain Chinese?

This question, seeded in classrooms and project sites, whispered in journals and inked in studio sketches, would echo into the next chapter of China’s architectural journey.

For those of us who sat in lecture halls decades later, listening to professors like Jin Qiuye retell these stories—not merely as nostalgia or history, but as unfinished threads—the search continues.

And so we step into the next chapter:
A time of opening, of possibility, and of peril.
When the market became the new ideology, and spectacle the new syntax.
What remains of tradition when it becomes a brand?
And can modernity still carry meaning, when it is for sale?

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