The CCA Launches a Comprehensive Research Initiative and Exhibition on Modern Architecture in China

"The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) recently launched a new research project and institutional collaboration with M+ in Hong Kong titled How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949-1979. The project unfolds through an exhibition presented in the CCA's Main Galleries from 20 November 2025 to 5 April 2026, a series of commissioned films and oral history videos by artist Wang Tuo, online editorial content, public programming, and a companion book co-published by the CCA and M BOOKS."

"This collection of content seeks to reframe architectural histories of modernism in the first three decades of the People's Republic of China, revealing how design operated under shifting ideologies and socioeconomic pressures through the perspectives and experiences of architects, institutions, and residents. The project aligns with the CCA's ongoing interest in producing new readings of modern architecture across different sociopolitical contexts and geographical frameworks."

"CCA research projects interrogate the political forces that shape how architecture is made, used, and interpreted. The How Modern project begins with the historical observation that between the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its Reform and Opening Up in 1979, architecture was an essential instrument in shaping the state's vision of socialist modernity."

How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 presents an exhibition, commissioned films and oral histories by Wang Tuo, online editorial material, public programming, and a companion book co-published by the CCA and M BOOKS. The project reframes modernist architectural histories of the first three decades of the People's Republic of China by revealing how design responded to shifting ideologies and socioeconomic pressures through architects', institutions', and residents' perspectives and experiences. The curatorial approach interrogates assumptions that nationalization and collectivization eliminated creative agency, that industrial productivity trumped design quality, and that a single state-imposed national style defined the era.

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