Building big, with no regret

Abstract

China has long been obsessed with constructing enormous, monumental buildings, often at a huge human and social cost. Beijing’s ‘Ten Great Buildings’ project, built between 1958 and 1959, marked a new milestone in the nation’s recent history and its legacy still exerts a powerful influence on China’s architectural, urban, and social development.

This essay will explore how Beijing’s ‘Ten Great Buildings’ project was envisioned as part of an architectural and urban initiative of the Great Leap Forward and examine how the architects who worked on the project became embroiled in a continuing struggle to devise a style that would be suitable for the new socialist regime. It will also study how the project, which consumed enormous resources and labor, was built in 10 to 12 months in order to meet the government’s deadline to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the ‘New China’ - at the moment when China was experiencing one of its most dire socioeconomic crises.

Based on a study of the project in relation to China’s politics, economy, social organization and the lives of its people in the late 1950s, this essay will further explore how the legacy of ‘building big’ still persists in today’s China on many levels of its governance and moreover, how this legacy is often transformed into a new hybrid when China’s revolutionary sediments become mixed with the currents of globalization.