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Appraisals of the splendor of architecture deal only with spatial and dispositional conditions to the degree that what is behind the “exterior” image is neglected altogether. To discern the life of the“interior,”circumstantial social conditions need to be considered in relation to physical laws of form and space. After a selective tour of not only the exterior but also periodically the interior of what goes on in the architecture of minority groups in southern China, I shall now turn the attention of my readers to the symbolic center of China—Tiananmen Square, or the Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace—to sum up how the symbolization of architecture, often against the intent of its designer, actually works. Tiananmen is the southern gate of the Forbidden City, which was the imperial palace in Beijing and now is the “museum of the old palace.” The massive square in front of Tiananmen was built after  by the Communist government for large-scale celebrations and rallies. Bound by the grand scale of the Great Hall of the People and the equally monumental Museum of Chinese History, the square was envisaged as the “political and cultural center” of the country ever since it was created in the early s. After the death of Chairman Mao in , his monolithic mausoleum was erected along the central axis on the southern portion of the square. As it says clearly with Chairman Mao’s script, “Serve the People,” on the wall of Xinhuamen (Gate of New China, west of Tiananmen along Chang’an Avenue), the intention of expanding the space before Tiananmen was to create a place for people to rally. Neither the Communist government nor 179 EPILOGUE 180 _| E P I L O G U E Chairman Mao in their wildest dreams wanted to recreate another imperial palace. But at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, millions of Red Guards, waving Mao’s “little red book” in their hands, rallied in Tiananmen Square to worship Chairman Mao. Mao, standing on the gate facing a sea of red books and flags, clearly enjoyed the status of an emperor. This “imperial power”of architecture never ceased to radiate after the decline of the emperor in the early twentieth century, not even after the death of Chairman Mao in . In April , three student representatives attempted to present a petition in Tiananmen Square; they did so on their knees, and on the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People, a gesture that mimicked the usual ritual of prostration that ordinary people performed before emperors in the past (Zhang Longxi , ). Even the literal meaning of Tiananmen—Gate of Heavenly Peace—bears little of the truth of its quiet witness to the twentieth century: “While the name of the gate, with its rich historical echoes and its evocations of a timeless sphere beyond politics, has seemed across the last century to bring a promise of solace to the Chinese people dreaming of escape from current realities, the gate itself in the same period came to stand implacably for the power of the state” (Spence , ). The implacable power of architecture that recurrently works on inhabitants is the theme of this book, but the way it works depends on an understanding , bodily as well as conceptually, even at the level of subconsciousness, of the built work by the inhabitants. This understanding is the evidence of the extraordinary capacity of human beings to engage symbolically with the built world. I have thus far, I hope, persuaded my readers to believe that, first of all, architecture is symbolic in the sense that it is empowering in the disposition of actions, and to a certain degree the thinking, of its inhabitants. Michel Foucault’s reading of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is perhaps the most pervasive example on this point (, –). The panopticon is a round prison where the periphery is divided as individual backlit cells and the center is a surveillance tower that has a direct view of each cell. Foucault calls it an apparatus or a machine; but the power is only exercised when the inmate is conscious that he is under constant surveillance. This visibility is also compounded by invisibility—he is not aware of his fellow inmates in the cells next to him. Bentham’s panopticon is designed to cause anxiety in the inmate; it a,ects his psyche, hence his behavior. A surveillance camera, unlike a spatial apparatus, does not necessarily create the same e,ect, for one is often...

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