Between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and its Reform and Opening Up in 1979, architecture was a key instrument in shaping the state’s vision of socialist modernity. Yet the development of modern architecture in China from this era has often been perceived as stunted, even non-existent, a perspective shaped by persistent misconceptions and narrow assumptions: that nationalization and collectivization denied architects and architecture creative agency, that projects prioritized industrial productivity over design quality, and that the state’s emphasis on a “national style” limited diversity of expression.

How Modern unfolds in three thematic categories. “Agency” presents the shifting and often intersecting degrees of agency exercised by the state, architects, or architecture, especially within systems of collectivized design and mass resource mobilization. “Industry” looks at how architects adapted to the multifaceted realities of China’s pivot to socialist industrialization and its emphasis on standardization, scientific rationalization, economy, and productivity. “Style” reconsiders the intention and dominance of the “national style” by presenting the stratified realities that led to heterogeneous formal experiments and expressions locally and abroad. Together, these frame the project of building socialism not just as a monolithic, top-down phenomenon, but as a process worked out in everyday practices that engaged the senses and creative will of citizens.

China’s transformation from a capitalist system to a centrally planned socialist state from the 1950s led to notable changes in how architectural practice was organized. Critics have often framed this shift as limiting the architect’s professional and creative autonomy—an independence deemed central to modern architecture. Architects in New China were perceived as being denied “individual creativity in favour of the collective,” with no agency to “explore abstract, critical and independent positions opposing mainstream practice.”¹ Yet, architects were in high demand in this period, at the helm of major projects to develop the character and image of the socialist state and its environments.

“Agency” is here framed as the ability to exercise creative and moral will to facilitate social betterment through political means. It embodies the political dimension of Modernism, as opposed to the “oppositional independence” often associated with the development of Euro-American modern architecture.² From the spatial transformation Beijing to the development of diverse building types across China, architectural agency should be understood in terms of how state power organized architectural production through mass resource mobilization, as well as how architects, officials, and other individuals exercised their judgment and volition. Between 1949 to 1979, the architecture profession had benefitted from, and at the same time bore the brunt of, China’s political flux. Architects were perceived as “heroes” of nation building in the 1950s, equal in status to technical workers during the 1960s “Design Revolution,” or right-wing intellectuals often sent to labour camps for thought reform during the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao’s portrait emblazoned the cover of Jianzhu Xuebao [Architecture Journal]. Nevertheless, the issue of agency goes beyond the architect’s capacity to exercise their autonomy at a given moment. In the context of New China, it is perhaps more useful to discern degrees of agency and political will exercised toward reform, particularly through the collectivization of architectural resources and expertise.

The architecture profession transformed considerably before and after the founding of the PRC. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chinese architects who had trained overseas established private practices for clients across commercial, residential, and civic sectors. They introduced how architecture could operate as an intellectual activity with professional responsibilities and theoretical principles.¹ During the transitional New Democracy period, the CCP allowed the coexistence of state-run, cooperative, and private architecture institutes to manage these tasks. Public design enterprises first opened in Shanghai and then in Beijing, operating directly under the central government. In 1952, alongside the almost complete nationalization of the country’s economy, state-owned design institutes were officially established. Through these, the CCP oversaw the production, distribution, and use of architectural projects, resources, and labour. Their proliferation across levels of government, in architectural schools, and in a range of ministries such as those focused on metallurgy, petroleum, and textiles enabled rapid and nationwide industrialization. Each institute worked as a social work unit (danwei 单位), with chief architects or engineers leading specialized design units.

Ideology as well as need drove the CCP’s agenda for socialist industrialization. Building socialism (shehuizhuyi jianshe 社会主义建设) was about building industry, a project often depicted in statistical charts marking soaring outputs of steel, coal, oil, and electricity.¹ With these new productive state demands, the architect’s work also moved beyond designing commercial high-rises and private mansions to factory planning and design. Ministries of machinery, metallurgy, aerospace, coal, electronics, or textiles established specialized, state-owned design institutes.² The CCP’s adoption of Marxist principles in state policies shifted industrial priorities to focus on the means of production over consumption preferences. Factories thus became more than utilitarian structures, transforming into sites where workers were encouraged to enact revolutionary beliefs. In designing spaces dedicated to industrial production, architects were also proletarian workers, encouraged to apply their expertise and skills to advance socialist industrialization. Songs were composed extolling the virtues of work and the nation, while some factories were decorated with banners proclaiming the spiritual value of hard work.

The state’s call to industrialization not only aimed to increase productive output; it also sought to inculcate cultural values of speed, efficiency, and economy. Speeches made by the Soviet Union’s First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, championed such modern ideals; these were diffused in publications across the Eastern Bloc, including in the CCP’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily. As part of his de-Stalinization efforts, Khrushchev’s 1954 speech at the Soviet All-Union Conference for Builders and Architects asked architects to “use not only architectural forms,” but to have an excellent understanding of “construction economy.”¹ At the sixth session of the Board of Directors of the Architectural Society of China, a new slogan—“function, economy, and (when circumstances allow) beauty” (shiyong jingji zai keneng tiaojian xia zhuyi meiguan 适用，经济， 在可能条件下注意美观)—promoted standardization, prefabrication, and scientific rationalization in design.² Architects fused their design expertise with the engineer’s know-how, analyzing the impact of design on building economics, user experience, and climatic effects. To this end, architecture was to be transformed into a modernized production process linked to the precision and mechanization of large-scale industry.

Yet, at least according to some critics and historians, the development of modern architecture in China between 1949 to 1979 was interrupted—if not entirely stalled–due to the issue of “style. Attempts by Chinese architects in the 1920s and 1930s to “refine the modernist vocabulary” were considered to have been abruptly “quashed by politics,” as the CCP promoted a “national style” to epitomize its socialist realist agenda.¹ If modern architecture is measured by features like abstraction, transparency, flat roofs, and the rejection of historical precedents, these views may seem fair.² But in post-revolutionary China, such formalist perspectives risk neglecting the ideological shifts that shaped and reshaped the profession’s conceptions of the “national style” and the “modern.”

After 1949, the widespread cultural embrace of the Stalinist slogan “socialist content, national form” led architects like Liang Sicheng to develop principles for a new “national style,” which he set forth in his text Zuguo de Jianzhu [Architecture of the Motherland] (1954).¹ Although Liang was against buildings “wearing a Western suit and a Chinese skullcap,” he proposed a theory of the “translatability” of classical Chinese architectural features in contemporary building. This concept influenced the widespread proclivity for adapting classical forms, whether in buildings topped with a big roof or Sino-Soviet friendship buildings.²

Architects in China and the Eastern Bloc were aware that the prevailing architectural formalism popular in Europe and North America, exemplified by the rise of the “International Style,” was increasingly tied to commodification and big business.³ To them, Euro-American modernism had deviated from the Modern Movement’s founding principles to serve the common people. Instead, they believed that socialist realism advocated for both a deeper and more pragmatic sociocultural purpose for architecture; abstract theories and conceptions of space could not serve the tastes of the working class.⁴ To this end, the national style aligned with Mao’s aesthetic belief that demanded the “popularization” of forms with “readily accepted characteristics” to uplift people’s collective identity.⁵ As a medium offering both embodied experiences and visual pleasure, architecture could mediate both the material and spiritual aspects of mass culture and socialist life.⁶

When Deng Xiaoping relaunched the Four Modernizations in industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense in 1978—a policy first conceived in 1964 that had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution—he did so with a call to “emancipate the mind and seek truth from facts” by reconciling ideology with proven and tested models.⁷ The Architectural Society of China responded by rethinking what architectural modernization could mean for the early Reform and Opening Up era, and recommitting to a new technological revolution and renewal of theory related to form and space.⁸ While this new orientation signalled a drastic shift from Mao-era socialist realist principles, its focus on practical needs and material-structural economy trumped stylistic orthodoxy; in this way, the architectural principles defining the period of Reform and Opening Up did not completely deviate from the values that underpinned the 1955 slogan “function, economy, and (when circumstances allow) beauty.”