1. Introduction
Before I left Beijing, I had lived my entire life within what architects once called the Chinese Dream — though I had always wondered whether it was ever truly ours to dream.
Since the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the sheer scale and velocity of construction in China have propelled the nation into global architectural consciousness. Yet this ascent came at the cost of eroded traditions, vanishing vernaculars, and a built environment increasingly shaped by performance metrics rather than cultural memory. The space for architectural reflection — ecological, historical, philosophical — has narrowed amidst the roaring machinery of development.
Architecture, once understood as the spatial expression of values and cosmologies, now often finds itself reduced to a service function: an instrument of GDP, branding, and urban tokenism. Within this paradigm, the architect risks becoming a silent technician rather than a critical agent. And yet, not all are silent. A new generation has begun to question not only whatwe build, but why—and for whom.
By the time I entered architecture school, China had already become a global construction powerhouse. I learned design through the lens of expansion: rapid urbanisation, spectacular form, digital simulation. But beneath the momentum, I often sensed something unspoken — an absence of language to articulate doubt, to slow down, to ask what had been lost. I wanted to trace the connection between space, memory, and people, and to ask whether architecture might still mean something beyond delivery and display.
In the margins of plans and the gaps between regulations, one sometimes glimpses the ghost of an alternative China — a China that might have built differently.
This article is an attempt to reclaim that space of questioning. It proposes a critical history of China’s architecture not as a stylistic chronology, but as a cultural and ideological cartography. From the ideological monumentality of the Mao era, through the technocratic urbanism of reform, to the spectacular hybridisation of global China, architecture has mirrored — and often manufactured — the shifting contours of national aspiration. Now, as China’s economic momentum slows, we are granted a rare pause—a moment to reflect, to listen, and to learn from what came before.
This piece began as my RCA thesis in 2017, but it has since evolved — revised with the weight of lived experience, fieldwork, and critical practice. What follows is neither exhaustive nor neutral. It is written in the belief that architecture is not merely about what stands, but about what endures — within memory, meaning, and time.