Building dreams

Michael Aldrich takes an architectural tour through 60 years of history

The ’50s I love Big Brother

At the beginning of the 1950s, Beijing’s urban designers celebrated China’s restoration of national pride by ironically following the lead of the Soviet Union as China’s ‘elder brother’ and primary benefactor.

Soviet motifs immediately came to the fore as you can see at the Beijing Exhibition Centre (opened in 1954) on Xizhimenwai Dajie. The Exhibition Centre recalls those heady early days with decorative sculptures of the labouring classes who have a surprisingly uniform Caucasian cast to their features.

Where else in Beijing (outside of a dodgy bath house or a luxury village) can you find a building decorated with statutes of hard-working white people? The Russian touches so

on dissipated once Mao cooled on Khrushchev’s revisionism. Two patterns emerged as the city rolled through the ’50s. The highly revered master architect of old Peking, Liang Sicheng, sought to combine Chinese motifs with the needs of modernity as we can see in the Beijing Railway Station (1959) and the Agricultural Exhibition Hall (1959).

The ’60s The calm before the storm

In the early 1960s, the Workers’ Gymnasium (1961) suggested the shape of things to come with a non-Soviet, modern Chinese design thatwas meant to foreshadow a new revolutionary world, as did the National Art Museum of China (1963), with its soft light brown stone and modern interpretation of classical Chinese symmetry.

These buildings were in step with a softer, more introspective style in the aftermath of the tumult of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward, as well as a simple, naïve embrace of sports and arts. But things stalled as the Cultural Revolution brought a temporary hiatus to the progress of the city’s construction.

The ’70s Danger and death

One of the few exceptions to this pause was the A Wing of what was once elegantly called L’Hotel de Pekin. At the height of the Cold War and in the middle of the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Hotel (now the Raffles Beijing Hotel) added a new and taller wing for its international visitors at a time when nothing international was going on – such was life in Beijing during the early 1970s.

Nevertheless, the eagerness to show progress spurred on the construction of the building, which is bereft of any Soviet or revolutionary inspired motifs. The wing’s claim to fame is that its designers made a serious error. Once the wing was completed someone realised that a sniper perched on the upper floors of the new wing could – with a telescopic sight – draw a clear bead on the politicos strolling about in Zhongnanhai.

Dismantling an existing building is something that Beijing’s city planners learned how to do much later on and wasnot an option then. The solution in this case was to build an artificial extension on top of the buildings on the side of the Forbidden City to act as a screen against any budding Chinese Lee Harvey Oswalds. 

And why not? If Mao’s own handpicked successor Lin Biao had been caught trying to knock off the Great Helmsman, you couldn’t be too careful. As the 1970s rolled on, Beijing somehow managed to survive like a downon- luck Manchu noble, living amid dereliction while trying to get on with the job of getting by.

In 1976, the Tangshan earthquake, foreshadowing the death of the Chairman that September, brought a wave of refugees tothe capital. Overcrowded courtyard houses were crammed with even more ‘temporary’ brick structures that stayed in situ for two decades. After Mao’s death in 1976, the citizens of the capital were handed the order to construct a final resting place for the Chairman by May 1977.

At the urging of Hua Guofeng and others, Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall (1977) completely broke the traditional cosmological symbolism of Tiananmen Square, plonking down a north-facing mausoleum right on the city’s central axis – an indication of further alterations to come. If it were a sound, the Memorial Hall would be a segue between Peking opera and avant-garde jazz.

The ’80s Last call for old Peking

In 1979, CITIC received the go-ahead to break the city’s skyline, thereby trouncing the image of Beijing as a horizontal city shaded by canopies of green leaf trees. Perched right next to the East Second Ring Road and Jianguomenwai Dajie, the CITIC Building (completed in 1985) was the first to emulate Western high-rise fashion. It soon became the fashionable site for the representative offices established by foreign companies.

Nicknamed the ‘chocolate building’, on account of its dark brown marble exterior, the CITIC Building changed therules of the game for urban design in Beijing forever. Old Peking folks believed that ghosts and spirits cruised at an altitude of 99 feet over the city. Anything higher than that would interfere with their flight path and thus incite the spirits to retaliate against us unthinking mortals. 

The ghosts of old Peking did not go without a fight. When the building was finally completed and its electrical wiring installed, the contractors needed to conduct the first of a series of acceptance tests to prove that the building’s design passed muster. Unfortunately, no one had really bothered to explain to the staff at the local electrical station that the acceptance test might put an undue strain on their resources.

Diplomats of the era described their relish at seeing the entire building light up and cast a powerful glow over the neighbourhood only to have the entire city blow a fuse and be plunged into darkness. The spirits had pulled one last practical joke on ‘New China’ before they withdrew from their unrecognisable city.

The ’90s Brave new and brutal world

The 1990s began sombrely. The opening of the China World Trade Centre in 1990 symbolised China’s desire to move remorselessly into the future. The 37-storey building effectively sucked all the multinationals out from the CITIC Building and became the premiere location in the city for lawyers, investment bankers and other formerly suspicious class enemies.

The China World Trade Centre was not without controversy in those days, as its overzealous security guards often took a more robust view of their duties when confronting locals who wandered in for a look. By the mid 1990s, Beijing had resolutely gone down the path of radical cosmetic surgerywith the heart of the city turning into a huge construction site.

East Chang’an Avenue looked like Manhattan’s Ground Zero as old neighbourhoods were dismantled and rebuilt amid floodlights and scaffolding, producing things such as the Oriental Plaza (1999). This new-look Beijing was cast in the image of freemarket capitalism with socialist characteristics, as if it was exhorting the masses to, ‘Move on, no loitering and don’t dwell on the past! You can’t change it anyway.’

The ’00s We’ve arrived, but where are we?

With the leap into the millennium, ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ became the theme as the momentum for modernity built up and the city hurriedly pursued new innovations, such as the Bird’s Nest (2008), the National Centre for the Performing Arts (dubbed The Egg by cabbies, 2007) and the new CCTV HQ (2008).

‘What does the design of your opera hall have to do with traditional Chinese culture?’ asked one of CCTV’s journalists of The Egg’s architect Paul Andreu, who flubbed the question by trying to give an answer. A pointed response would have been: ‘What do any of the new buildings along Chang’an Avenue have to do with traditional Chinese culture?’

The city’s new appearance underscored China’s desire to take on the world, and copy it, on its own terms, so differently from just 100 years ago when the Qing authorities had to blindfold the lions in front of Zhengyang Gate before the streets were asphalted, lest they take offense at such foreign things.

Michael Aldrich is a historian and long-term resident of Beijing. His book The Search for a Vanishing Beijing can be purchased at The Bookworm or online at www.hkupress.org .