In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

91 In the 1950s China received a massive economic aid package from the Soviet Union along with a constant stream of Soviet experts assisting in nearly all critical fronts of China’s socialist reconstruction. To provide political justification for the Soviet assistance, Chinese authorities launched a campaign called “Learning from the Soviet Union,” in which they openly adopted socialist ideology from the USSR. The ideological affiliation deeply changed the cultural scene in China, especially for the intellectual sector of society. This chapter outlines the political background that necessitated and facilitated the importation of Soviet architecture and reviews its influence on the architectural community in China. Focusing on the classicist method of architectural design that dominated Soviet construction and influenced China’s design in the 1950s, this chapter also retraces the events and projects that highlighted China’s changing scene of design and planning under Soviet influence. In so doing, it provides a critical perspective on the ideological and historical implications of the importation taking place during this brief but dynamic period. The Classicist Design Method in China Sources of Importation We can identify three main sources of the importation of the classicist method of architectural design to China in the twentieth century. All these methods shared the design preference for spacious and formal layout, the sensibility of massing and proportion, the eclectic use of the forms from the past to achieve monumentality, and the refinement of details.1 However, each source came to China in a special circumstance that affected the outcome of the importation in a different way. The first was from Western architects practicing in China and returning Chinese students from Western schools. This aspect of the process has been discussed in previous chapters. Mostly visible in the 1920s, the extended range includes buildings involving Western classical and Chinese traditional forms produced intermittently as late as the 1940s. Although the importation of the classicist method from this source took place principally in the professional context, it nevertheless reflected the country’s fundamental transformation from a decaying dynastic society to an evolving colonial-capitalist one. The political constituent of this source also lies in the successful use of the method to promote nationalism through revitalizing and monumentalizing Chinese traditional architecture. This method had a wide impact on China’s architectural scene, most notably in laying down the foundation for the K. Sizheng Fan A CLASSICIST ARCHITECTURE FOR UTOPIA The Soviet Contacts 5 92 K. Sizheng Fan assimilation by Chinese architects of the classicist method in both intellectual and practical areas. The introduction from the second source was an imposed one. It occurred during the period of Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945 through planning and construction in the occupied coastal cities, in Manchuria, and in Taiwan, as discussed in the next chapter. Japan had been exposed to Western architecture almost half a century earlier than China. The monumental government buildings in Changchun, then the capital of the puppet Manchuguo regime, exemplified the classicist method in designs based on Chinese traditional elements through Japanese interpretation.2 In addition, and unrelated to Japan’s invasion of China, Chinese students had gone to Japan to study architecture, which predated other overseas studies by a generation.3 While some of the returning students, such as Liu Dunzhen and Shan Shiyuan, became leading scholars of traditional Chinese architecture, academic discussion of the influence of Japanese education on architecture in China was sporadic at best.4 The third source, which is the subject of this chapter, was also caused by a dramatic change of political condition and was received from a single country: the Soviet Union.5 However, this importation was invited. It took place after the founding of the People’s Republic, as the result of China’s political alliance with the Soviet Union, which started in 1950 and ended in the early 1960s.6 During the period they were allied, China invited thousands of Soviet technicians, engineers, designers, and scholars—commonly referred to as Soviet experts—to help reconstruct the country. Among the incoming experts were also architects and planners, who brought in the classicist design method, at the time the only officially sanctioned method in the Soviet Union.7 The duration of the contact between Soviet architecture and the architecture in China was relatively short, but it produced some of the highest-profile building and urban planning projects in China and had a dramatic, long-term effect on the built domain in China...

Share