2.3 Ghosts in the Grid





By the early 1960s, the monumental fervour of 1959 had begun to wane. The steel skeletons of the Ten Great Buildings had barely cooled before the country plunged into a darker chapter: the failure of the Great Leap Forward, widespread famine, and growing disillusionment with utopian promises. Architecture, which had been mobilised as spectacle, now stood eerily still—massive façades casting long shadows over empty granaries.

Amidst this disorientation, something subtle began to shift. A faint self-consciousness flickered within the architectural discourse. In the 1963 issues of Architectural Journal, keywords like “form,” “function,” “aesthetics,” and “economy” surfaced with greater frequency, hinting at a tentative return to architectural thinking beyond the strictly political. These were not radical acts—but they signalled a quiet search for disciplinary depth in a climate that had long suppressed ambiguity.

Still, the planning ethos remained largely technocratic. Urban schemes increasingly adopted Soviet-style zoning diagrams: block grids, mono-functional sectors, and centralised control. The city became a diagram, the diagram a plan, the plan a substitute for life. In this rigid syntax of streets and sectors, a kind of haunted spatiality emerged—places designed for ideals rather than for people. The ghosts in the grid were not spirits of the dead, but absences of the living: informal paths erased, courtyards flattened, vernacular rhythms overwritten by abstract order.

The haunting was not accidental. Mao’s rhetoric of tabula rasa transformation demanded precisely this erasure. Land was not a site of continuity, but a canvas for political inscription. In this logic, courtyard demolished, hutong paved over, was an act of ideological hygiene. Architecture became not only the medium of state power, but its sanitation device—cleansing history to erect a purified modernity.

And yet, cracks persisted.

In some university studios, students began revisiting traditional tectonics. In design competitions, the question of “Chinese form” was tentatively re-posed—not as propaganda, but as a spatial language worthy of reinterpretation. The terms of engagement were still fraught, but a question had been planted: Could architecture re-engage the past without serving the state?

Even as a child, I sensed the rhythm of Beijing not in its avenues, but in its cracks. I remember once wandering through the old alleys behind Xisi with my parents, long before their demolition. The bricks were uneven, the windows mismatched, but it smelled like memory—like stewed cabbage, wet earth, and old books. Years later, those alleys were replaced by an administrative compound in clean concrete. But even now, when I close my eyes, I can trace the rhythm of the lane by instinct. Memory resists erasure, even when the grid insists otherwise.

To walk through the hutongs was to write a minor language upon a major plan—what Michel de Certeau might call the 'tactics of the weak'. Architecture in the mid-60s hovered between repression and reawakening. The dominant forms still served ideological stability, but the ghosts in the grid whispered. They asked questions the official diagrams could not answer. Not “what shall we build,” but “what have we already lost?”