2.2 Sovietisation and the Ten Great Buildings








If the 1950s began with the ideological disciplining of architectural language, then 1959 marked its monumental materialisation. That year, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the state initiated an unprecedented building campaign: the so-called Ten Great Buildings (十大建筑) of New China. Located in Beijing, they were not merely structures—they were staged statements, spatial tableaux designed to visualise the power and ambition of the socialist state.

Each building was assigned a function: assembly, exhibition, diplomacy, sports, railway, culture. But the deeper function was symbolic. These projects formed the architectural constellation of the Maoist capital, a “Red Beijing” that would rival the imperial axis of the past and echo the grandeur of Moscow. They were designed largely by Chinese architects from the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD), yet under heavy Soviet influence and often with direct consultation from Soviet specialists. In their planning and style, the echoes of Stalinist architecture—symmetry, massing, axiality, and ornamented hierarchy—were unmistakable. By 1958, the Architectural Design Institutes (ADIs), organised under various ministries and municipal governments, were tasked not only with design but ideological compliance. Architects became civil servants of the plan, not visionaries of space.

Take the Great Hall of People (人民大会堂) as the paradigm. Designed in less than two months and completed in under a year, the building stretches 356 metres along the western edge of Tiananmen Square. Its imposing colonnade features exactly ten freestanding columns, an architectural pun on the “ten years of New China.” The entire complex was aligned to produce a new ceremonial axis—parallel to the Forbidden City, yet ideologically antithetical. If the imperial axis culminated in the throne of the Son of Heaven, the new axis culminated in the People’s Assembly, a hall for the collective will—at least in theory.

The aesthetic was eclectic by necessity. Under the party’s directive of “national form, socialist content” (民族形式，社会主义内容), architects were expected to synthesise traditional Chinese motifs—bracket sets, roof ridges, symmetry—with modernist structural systems and Stalinist massing. The result was a hybrid style: part operatic spectacle, part bureaucratic ambition, neither fully traditional nor modern. Many buildings featured pseudo-classical porticos with Chinese tile roofs, a typology now referred to pejoratively as “big roof architecture” (大屋顶). It was a style designed not for critique, but for legibility—for the people, for the Party, for the photograph. In later decades, this style came under sharp criticism. Architect Wang Shu would call it “a formal costume detached from inner life,” suggesting that it represented not cultural continuity but aesthetic theatre. What masqueraded as heritage was, in his words, “a reenactment without belief.”

Seen from the perspective of critical theory, these projects also mark a paradoxical inversion of what Kenneth Frampton once called critical regionalism—where architecture resists universal modernism by re-engaging with local culture. In the Chinese case, however, the vernacular was not rediscovered but instrumentalised—reduced to a state-administered iconography, scripted to perform national unity. Instead of resisting homogenisation, the “national form” became part of the homogenising machine, its symbolic gestures replicated across cities with bureaucratic precision.

Yet even as this hybrid aesthetic gained dominance in China, its Soviet parent was beginning to disown it. In 1955, the Soviet Union issued the Decree on the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction, a formal repudiation of the decorative monumentalism that had defined Stalinist architecture. The decree criticised “architectural embellishments that serve no functional purpose” and called for a return to efficiency, rationality, and material clarity. Ironically, just as Moscow began retreating from ornamented grandeur, Beijing was embracing it—codifying excess as the symbol of national identity. This temporal dissonance revealed how “national form” in China was less a response to evolving design thinking, and more a political theatre of catch-up ideology. In a strange twist of fate, China was left dancing alone to a song its composer had already silenced.

Criticism, however, did emerge—even within official publications. Architectural Journal in 1959 hosted debates on whether Beijing should emulate the “imperial capitals” of the West. Some architects warned of the danger of monumentalism, cautioning that the nation faced far more pressing issues, such as a massive housing shortage. Their dissent, while carefully worded, hinted at the widening gap between symbolic construction and real social needs. The state’s architectural resources were channelled into civic iconography, while everyday residential design languished in typological stagnation.

As a student decades later, I often passed the Beijing Exhibition Centre (北京展览馆), one of the earliest Soviet-style complexes in the city. Its golden spire and central tower stood like a transplanted fragment of Moscow. I remember feeling confused—was this truly Chinese architecture? I now understand that the building embodied an imported fantasy, an aesthetic template for a utopian society that never arrived.

This period cemented not only a stylistic orthodoxy, but a psychological one. The heroic scale of these buildings served to obscure the instability beneath. The Ten Great Buildings were completed during the height of the Great Leap Forward—a time of famine, forced collectivisation, and industrial hallucination. Architecture became both mirror and mask: reflecting ambition, concealing trauma.

Today, these buildings remain. Tourists pose beneath their façades. Political pageantry still unfolds on the granite expanse of Tiananmen Square. But what we rarely confront is their origin as tools of soft domination—architecture as spectacle, as discipline, as myth. In them, we glimpse the first full realisation of what I call “Party-form” space —architecture deployed as soft domination, ritualised permanence, and ideological hygiene.