The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has launched an ambitious research initiative in collaboration with Hong Kong’s M+ exploring modern architecture in China from 1949 to 1979. The project, How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979, unfolds across an exhibition at the CCA’s Main Galleries from 20 November 2025 to 5 April 2026, a series of commissioned films and oral histories by artist Wang Tuo, online editorial content, public programming, and a companion book co-published by the CCA and M BOOKS.

Challenging assumptions that architecture in early socialist China was stifled, the initiative reexamines how architects navigated shifting political, cultural, and social pressures. It highlights the interplay between state control, professional agency, and creative adaptation, showing how design contributed to China’s vision of socialist modernity. The exhibition and research frame modernism not as a fixed style but as a field shaped by policy, economy, and technology.

The project is structured around three thematic lenses: Agency, which investigates the intersecting influence of the state, architects, and institutions; Industry, focusing on standardisation, productivity, and the demands of socialist industrialisation; and Style, exploring how the so-called “national style” coexisted with diverse formal experiments and local innovation.

Wang Tuo’s commissioned film series, Intensity in Ten Cities, captures ten architectural sites across China, including housing complexes, industrial facilities, parks, and cultural venues. These works offer social biographies of each site, highlighting the complex negotiation between policy and everyday practice, scarcity and abundance, and domestic and international influence.

The companion book consolidates research and insights, extending the project’s reach beyond the gallery. How Modern situates architecture as a medium through which society, politics, and culture converge, offering fresh perspectives on modernism under complex conditions.

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