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.