Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts

ZHANG VS. ZHANG

301 Zhang Bo and Zhang Kaiji were prominent figures in the field of architecture in China, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Although not related, the two Zhangs shared more than a family name. Zhang Bo (1911–1999) was born a year earlier than Zhang Kaiji (1912–2006), and both received their architectural education at National Central University in Nanjing, today Southeast University, where the curriculum was based upon Beaux-Arts principles, and both worked at the stateowned Beijing Institute of Architectural Design and Research (BIADR) as chief architects from BIADR’s founding days in the 1950s until their retirements, 1995 for Zhang Bo and 1997 for Zhang Kaiji (see their short biographies at the end of the chapter). While at BIADR, although the government was their sole client, neither Zhang seemed to be fully in line with Marxist ideology. For instance, neither Zhang became a member of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1959, when Tiananmen Square was redesigned to become the symbolic political and cultural focal point of the country to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, Zhang Bo led the design team that created the Great Hall of the People on the west side of the Square, while Zhang Kaiji was responsible for the Revolution and History Museums of China on the east side. However, as colleagues and friends, as well as rivals, the two architects not only created a symmetrical pair of monumental anchors for the center of the nation’s capital—thus epitomizing a Beaux-Arts-inspired, classicist influence in China—but with their designs they also signaled a barely distinguishable split in the aesthetic direction of Chinese architectural development, which then was amplified in the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter seeks to decipher the nuanced differences between the built work of the two architects and to elucidate the significant impact that the two approaches eventually had on contemporary Chinese architecture. By comparing three pairs of buildings in Beijing designed by the two Zhangs, we can draw conclusions that show specifically how the notions of color, figure, aesthetic taste, and cultural value vary from one architect to the other. Yung Ho Chang ZHANGVS. ZHANG Symmetry and Split: A Development in Chinese Architecture in the 1950s and 1960s 13 302 Yung Ho Chang Comparison 1 Zhang Bo’s Great Hall of the People (Renmin Dahuitang, 1959) and Zhang Kaiji’s Museums of Chinese History and the Chinese Revolution (Zhongguo Geming Lishi Bowuguan, now the National Museum, 1959) The Great Hall of the People (figs. 13.1 and 13.2), a grandiose compound flanking the west side of Tiananmen Square, reflects the official socialist ideology of the state and epitomizes some of the direct influences on China from the contemporary architecture in the Soviet Union, which are the focus of K. Fan Sizheng’s chapter in this book. However, the building also imposes and reconfirms aesthetic principles that have their roots in the long traditions of imperial China. For example, the use of glazed, golden yellow roof tiles, similar to those found on the palaces of the Forbidden City on the northern end of the Square, puts a twist of obvious Chinese flavor in the otherwise Western classical composition of the Great Hall. On the exterior, solidity and opacity are the main expressions of the complex, qualities Fig. 13.1. Zhang Bo, Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Photo by author. Fig. 13.2. Zhang Bo, Great Hall of the People, Beijing, 1960. Photo by author. 303 Zhang vs. Zhang also reminiscent of the nearby Forbidden City. Coincidentally, and probably deliberately, the Great Hall reveals its own somewhat ironically forbidden nature, in the sense that it, too, is guarded and is open to the public only on special occasions. After all, its architectural typology was that of a palace, which was probably more familiar to Zhang Bo, an architect coming from a strong, BeauxArts -inspired training, than a socialist-democratic conference center, which was the main function of the Great Hall. Although it is similar in many ways to the Great Hall of the People, from the grand front stairs and colonnade to its symmetry and monumentality and to its compliance with social realism imported from Russia, the Museums of Chinese History and the Chinese Revolution (figs. 13.3 and 13.4) also differ from the Great Hall that...