A History of Design Institutes in China

From Mao to Market

Charlie Q. L. Xue, Guanghui Ding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351356787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

A History of Design Institutes in China examines the intricate relationship between design institutes, the state, and, in later periods, the market economy through a carefully situated discussion of significant theoretical and historical issues including socialist utopia, collective and individual design, structural transformation, and architectural exportation, amongst others. It shows how, over the past six decades, China's design institutes have served the state's strategy for socialist construction and urbanisation to create socioeconomic and cultural value. Through first-hand research, authors Xue and Ding reveal how the tensions between pragmatism, creativity, collaboration, and resistance have played a crucial role in defining architectural production.

Appealing to academics, researchers, and graduate students, this book provides a much-needed contribution to the discourse on architectural history, building practices, and policymaking in contemporary China.

1
Introduction

In an article published in Architectural Review in 1945, American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock distinguished two types of buildings: the architecture of bureaucracy and the architecture of genius.¹ The former refers to the product of large-scale architectural organizations (such as Albert Khan, Inc.), from which personal expression is absent; the latter refers to buildings designed by creative individual architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. This categorization pointed out the marked difference between pragmatic, collective production and artistic, individual creation that existed then and continues to exist in the building industry today. While Hitchcock claimed that the bureaucratic and creative practices had different purposes (to fulfill practical versus spiritual needs) and should be judged by different criteria, they were in reality complementary.

What is particularly interesting is that these two separate models of practice spontaneously coexisted in China’s state-owned design institutes, which both employed mature, creative design masters and trained and hired a large number of professional architects and engineers. While dismantling privately run design firms, the Chinese Communist state established state-owned design institutes in the early 1950s, in such a way as both to address the challenge of large-scale industrialization and construction and to create a distinguished architectural culture that maintained remarkably native characteristics. While in response to the state’s requirements most design professionals worked on projects of a bureaucratic nature—bureaucratic buildings such as factories, housing, schools, offices, and hospitals—a number of creative practitioners within design institutes endeavored to transcend the monotony of architectural production. Through both individual imaginative effort and collective intense collaboration, established architects steering the creative direction of design institutes have, over the past six decades, made seminal contributions to shaping China’s architectural culture.

This book offers a critical examination of the history of state-owned design institutes in China, covering both pragmatic, large-scale production and explorative and creative experimentation. In doing so, we focus on the interaction between individuals, design institutes, and the larger social, economic, political, cultural, and ideological circumstances. The study seeks to answer a key question: what does the history of China’s design institutes reveal about individual aesthetic experimentation and collective socio-political engagement? In the process of this intellectual inquiry, a number of subquestions about design institutes and the role they have played and continue to play in China’s economy, politics, and culture emerge.

These questions can be broadly articulated as follows: (1) What was the motivation for establishing, reforming, and transforming design institutes at certain historical junctures, and what were their philosophies of practice and mission? (2) To what extent did design institutes contribute to China’s construction as a socialist state, both physically and culturally? (3) How did established architects struggle to reconcile collectivism and individualism, embeddedness and emancipation, and pragmatism and commitment during the process of architectural practice? (4) How did design institutes position themselves in the state-market–society network?

To better understand the role of China’s state-owned design institutes and their historical evolution, it is necessary to trace their emergence through the whole modern period (1840 to the present) and to briefly outline the social and professional contexts in which these institutes have operated. After the Opium War (1840) and the series of treaties with Western countries in the mid-nineteenth century, China’s coastal cities were opened to foreign trade.² Beginning in the late nineteenth century, building design firms run by expatriates appeared in these treaty cities.³ In the 1920s, the first group of Chinese architecture students finished their studies in the West and returned to China. Within a few years some of these Chinese architects had opened their own firms and would later be known as “the first generation of Chinese architects.”⁴

These firms enjoyed strong growth during the years prior to World War II. They were able to display their talents in many urban centers such as Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and other coastal cities until Japanese troops invaded China in 1937. With the start of war, private architectural design firms were increasingly regulated, either to serve the Nationalist government’s planning system or through being confined to international settlements governed by British merchants.⁵ Then, after World War II, a civil war broke out between the Communists and Nationalists. In all, for approximately a decade, between 1938 and 1949, China was engulfed in war, turmoil, and disaster, so that little substantial construction could take place.

When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the Communist government, under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), was determined to walk the socialist road and therefore joined the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Following the Soviet model, China enacted its First Five-Year Plan in 1953, which involved the transfer of private property and businesses to public ownership. At this point, private design firms were gradually phased out and replaced by state-owned design institutes, starting in the major cities. Around a hundred architects and design professionals escaped from Communist rule and fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan. However, the majority of the first generation of Chinese architects remained on the Chinese mainland and became the backbone of the state-owned design institutes.⁶ This was the beginning of the Mao era—the starting point of this book’s narrative.

These newly established design institutes were usually staffed by over 1,000 people, and therefore their scale was much larger than that of the old private practices. Like other socialist “units,” these design institutes were run like autonomous societies. They operated their own canteens and staff quarters. Some even had nurseries and kindergartens. With their capacity to coordinate large teams of design professionals, these institutes were able to serve the nationwide needs of postwar reconstruction and industrialization during the 1950s.⁷ The blueprints for most buildings constructed in the capital city, coastal metropolises, and county towns were created by the numerous design institutes established within ministries, provinces, cities, and districts. These design institutes also fulfilled hundreds of construction aid projects in developing countries across Asia and Africa, as part of China’s diplomatic strategy.

Later, from 1966 to 1976, the country fell into the unprecedented turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, many design institutes were closed and large numbers of professional architects were sent to the countryside for “re-education” in labor camps. It was not until reformists gained power in 1974 that the design institutes recovered their capacity to operate and gradually regained their prominence in China’s architectural practice.⁸

Since 1978, China has adopted an open-door policy, and its population has witnessed a huge amount of urban construction throughout the country. In the 1990s, private design firms were permitted to return to China’s market, although state-owned design institutes retained a dominant position. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, foreign architects began to open design offices in China and their firms gradually expanded. Today, state-owned design institutes, private domestic firms, and foreign architectural design firms all coexist, and in many cases they closely colla-borate. Many of the recently built megastructures in China were designed by famous foreign architects. However, the documentation and construction of these structures were implemented by Chinese design institutes. For example, the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing was completed through collaboration between Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture and the East China Architectural Design and Research Institute. Similarly, the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art was a joint project of the Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu) and the Hangzhou Architectural Design and Research Institute.

When China adopted an open-door policy and gradually switched to a market economy in the early 1980s, design institutes started to charge fees and to swim in the ocean of the market. From 1980 onward, China’s annual gross domestic product grew at a rate of over 7% at the expense of the environment and natural resources. More money was invested in infrastructure projects, the construction of new towns, the renovation of old cities, and “face-lifts” for megastructures such as airports, train stations, grand theaters, convention centers, star hotels, Class A office towers, commercial complexes, and university cities. In recent decades, 60% of the world’s construction sites have been located in China. Most of these projects have been undertaken by state-owned design institutes.

From the early dynasties of ancient China, government officers have commonly taken charge of building affairs. These officers and their staff undertook the tasks of documenting their official building systems and passing their knowledge on to the builders of the next generation. In contemporary China, state-owned design institutes have shouldered a similar task of inheriting, expanding on, and passing the torch of “authoritative” Chinese standards in architectural design through practice, research, and regulations. Over the past six decades, from Mao to the market-oriented society, design institutes have fundamentally transformed the face of Chinese society. They have modified the conditions of people’s everyday lives, translating China’s ongoing modernization project into a new built environ ment.

Existing scholarship on socialist design institutes

In the West, the organization of architectural design practice can be dated back to the late Renaissance period. With the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, the existing patronage model was significantly transformed from a system of master builders serving the social elite into a system of professionals serving an affluent middle class.⁹ The more capable architects ran their own design firms, as sole principals, partnerships, or corporations. The vast majority of architects joined private practices and served the diverse demands of numerous clients. However, some architects still worked for the state. For instance, the United Kingdom’s government had its own architectural department, which still employs architects who contribute to local architectural programs.¹⁰ The Architecture Office of the London County Council (LCC) was the largest design organization in Britain and contributed almost half of the design in London from the 1940s to the 1970s.¹¹ In the United States, with increasing production and urban construction after World War II, corporate design firms arose as a new professional entity, in contrast with the ateliers of design geniuses. These large design firms are characterized by consistent products, instead of signature architects.¹²

During the socialist period in the Soviet Union and later in several Eastern European countries, state-owned units of designers took the primary role in serving their countries’ construction agendas. These efforts, however, were little publicized in the English literature. Only after the end of the Cold War did studies of Soviet and Eastern European architecture during the socialist period gradually emerge in the Western academic world. Anders Aman has revealed how Eastern European countries learned their approach to art, planning, and architecture from the socialist realism of the Soviet model. Their massive industrial and infrastructure buildings showed the enormous military and economic potential of state socialism and seemed to demonstrate the mastery of the “new Soviet man” over nature. Such development schemes on a virtually megalithic scale provided a form of international and domestic propaganda that commingled economic and functional rationales.¹³

As Neil Leach has shown, the Communist system brought about a transformation of space and labor that fundamentally changed both society and the practice of architecture.¹⁴ Early achievements in large-scale prefabricated housing ran parallel with similar efforts in postwar reconstruction in Western Europe. Zarecor and Kulić have separately examined the situation after the war in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In 1948, private architects in Czechoslovakia were converted to a design institute, Stavoprojekt, a state-owned design machine that in its heyday in 1973 had 23,000 staff and 76 offices. Industrialization and prefabrication were the new avant-garde format developed before the war. In Yugoslavia, to cope with the large scale of reconstruction, every 10 buildings were apportioned to one expert engineer. After Yugoslavia left the Soviet orbit, design institutes and architects became “self-managing” in terms of work and income from the 1950s onward. They thus enjoyed more freedom and more profits.¹⁵

In 2012, The Journal of Architecture devoted a special issue to the topic of “Cold War transfer: Architecture and planning from socialist countries in the ‘Third World.’” The papers presented in this issue described the “construction aid” for projects in Asia and Africa provided by the USSR and Eastern European countries. These construction efforts took place against the same backdrop and in some of the same places where China was also actively contributing to infrastructural and civil architecture.

There have been many publications on the topic of Chinese architecture since 1978.¹⁶ However, most have focused on describing the most glamorous designs of the more famous master architects, and have provided more large color pictures than discussion of design practices. Few of these publications have focused on the transformations of design systems or the organizational mechanisms behind these creations. However, the China Building Industry Yearbook, which has been published annually since 1993, offers information that is useful for further analysis. The data in these yearbooks are collected by the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction.

In recent years, a number of specialized studies on China’s design institutes have appeared in articles, edited books, and degree theses, most of them written in Chinese but some in English. For instance, Zhang Qinnan reviewed the history of the East China Architectural Design Institute, arguing that such state-owned institutes in the 1950s integrated the country’s major design strengths and made impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Engineering the political machine
• PART II Surfing the economic wave
• PART III Enhancing the cultural power
• 9 Conclusion
• Chronology of design institutes in China
• Bibliography of design institutes
• Index