Search results

In 1980, Zeng Zhaofen, an academic at Tsinghua University, co-founded World Architecture, a journal devoted to introducing global architecture to China. While steering the journal's operations by editing articles and organizing academic activities during his editorship (1980–1995), Zeng seldom published architecture criticism in his own periodical, but rather did so in the journal's local rival, The Architect. His writings, with their strongly committed political and operative tendencies, became one of the leading voices advocating for abstract modernism in 1980s China. This paper draws on Walter Benjamin's notion of the constellation, using Zeng's critical activities as a vehicle to examine the conditions of possibility for journal culture and architecture criticism. It argues that The Architect journal and Zeng's published criticism maintained a shared character as a constellation through juxtaposing multiple texts, architects, projects, and ideas and presenting coherent positions within an underlying structuralized pattern—reconstructing the repressed discourse of modernism. The historical appearance of this intellectual constellation was dependent on a vibrant ecosystem of architecture criticism that reached its heyday in the 1980s, characterized by the dynamic and productive interactions between critics, editors, architects, and other stakeholders in a relaxed socio-political climate.

Construction aid was a physical tool – and indeed a key tactical manoeuvre – of international diplomacy that became especially obvious during the Cold War period. Among the outcomes of construction aid were cultural and technical exchanges between the donor and recipient countries. This essay examines the typical construction aid projects gifted by the Chinese Communist government and professionals to developing countries in Asia and African during the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, with a focus on key Asian examples. The remarkably high percentage of national income spent by Maoist China on construction aid might have increased the burden upon the lives of ordinary Chinese people, yet they gave Chinese architects rare opportunities to practice Modernism in overseas environments. The strength of the technical forces of the Chinese Communist state, and the wisdom of Chinese designers, were notably crystallized through a series of conference halls and stadiums built across Asia. These construction aid projects informed similar designs back in China, which led in turn to further innovations that could then again be exported abroad. Altogether it represents an important non-Western strand within Modernist architecture of the twentieth century.