Spatialization of Socialist Agendas:

Comparing the Great Hall of the People and the Federal Executive Building

Qisen Song

Honors Thesis (In Progress, Expected in April 2020)

Vanderbilt University

December 12, 2019

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Abstract1

After suffering WWII and subsequent civil wars, two newborn Communist states, China
and Yugoslavia, had similar urgency to recover from tremendous infrastructural destruction and
reassemble a unified national identity composed of multiple ethnicities. As a concrete reflection
of growth and prosperity, architecture served as the tool of both authoritarian powers to deliver
symbolic and political messages to domestic and international society. Mao and Tito's
governments both implemented transformation plans for their former-imperial capitals, Beijing
and Belgrade. However, their expressions of ideology and modernity were dramatically different.
In the early post-war years, Mao looked to the USSR as a model while Tito broke from Stalin
and led Yugoslavia into the Non-Alignment Movement.
To examine the impact of political ideology on architectural style, this thesis conducts a
visual analytical comparison between two flagship governmental buildings in the new capitals,
the Great Hall of the People (1959) in Tiananmen Square, Beijing and the Federal Executive
Council Building (1961) in New Belgrade. These massive complexes have not been analyzed
together, because the former deploys a vernacular Beaux-arts style influenced by socialist
realism and the latter adopts a drastically different modernist approach.
This thesis argues that both projects served as the artistic standard for artists and architects
to follow in order to be favored by the socialist regimes. It thus becomes the experiential
spatialization of their respective political agenda. By surveying the archives from the design
process, I investigate the direct and indirect involvement of political leadership in architectural
planning. The design and construction process were already a blatant political manifestation of
the promised national unity and ideological positionally. Based on the visual analysis of the
exterior design and architectural drawings, I questioned how their similar political needs but
divergent self-presentations leading to sometimes similar sometimes distinct structural choices.
Furthermore, by analyzing the interior decorations and works of art, especially what artistic
styles and forms were criticized, I examine how in both projects district-themed salons achieved
the metaphorical national unity within the spatial construction. I also recognize that the Beaux-
arts education received by the early Chinese architects in the US and the modernist training for
Yugoslav architects in Europe were intimately reflected in these two national flagship projects.
Presenting two contrasting architectural solutions to parallel political situations and
historical contexts, this thesis offers a new case study to the long-standing conversation about the
relationship between political powers and architecture. Additionally, repositioning the overseas
educational backgrounds of individual architects in large-scale projects provides a channel to
study the transfer, production, and integration of architectural traditions across borders.

1
As my Honors thesis is still in progress of writing and editing (expected to be completed in April 2020), here
I provide an abstract to some of the key arguments that I imagine to argue in the finished version, which would
be approximately 60 pages excluding notes, bibliography, and illustrations.
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Introduction (this is bold)

As the construction only took place between 1958 to 1959, the Great Hall of the People is

usually considered merely as an architectural product of the Communist regime. However, it

should be rather contextualized, both inside and outside the examination of architecture, of its

historical and cultural circumstances that can be traced back to the modern Chinese history more

than a century before the establishment of the People’s Republic. An overarching historical

situation is a clash between China and the Western powers. Such confrontation played out on all

different social, political, and cultural dimensions that fundamentally carved out a modern

Chinese thinking model built on the cultural comparison, either an East-West comparison or a

Past-Present comparison.2 Furthermore, the long years of brutal warfare brought upon by the

Western powers completely scattered the geographical control and imperial identity of the last

imperial Qing dynasty, thus catalyzing several subsequent nationalistic attempts to launch a new,

unified national identity of China.3 The establishment of the People’s Republic of China,

championed by Mao’s Communist Party, thus resumed the efforts of recasting such identity.

Under the intellectual influences of nationalism, architects were also vigorously reimagining the

modern Chinese architectural unique to their homeland. After studying and practicing broad in

the 1920s, many pioneering Chinese architects returned home and envisioned the architectural

modernity of China as an integration between the Chinese traditions and Western modernism.

However, their conceptualization was subject to the ideological influence of the state

administration. The political discourses and architectural debates surrounding the design of the

2
David Lowenthal, “Epilogue: The Past in the Present,” in The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 585–610.
3
The attempts to destroy remaining imperialism and introduce democratic governments were also complicated
with some brief restorations of imperialism by individual warlords and political actors, such as Xun Zhang and
Shikai Yuan. The last emperor of Qing, Puyi, also became the puppet emperor of the Japanese-controlled state
of Manchukuo later in 1934. For the history of democracy in the early twentieth-century China, see Jonathan
D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 137-388.
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Great Hall, then, continued the long-standing mix of contestations and reconciliations between

the East and West in the communist era.

The introduction of new Western ideas and lifestyles to China was achieved in the

backdrop of traumatizing military campaigns and iron-handed commercialization. In the

aftermath of the Opium War of 1840 to 1842, with the implementation of a series of treaties

initiated with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the Western powers forcefully opened the gateway

of China in an unprecedented manner. The weakening Qing empire removed all restrictions for

foreign commercial expansions and conceded unregulated land use rights in five vital port cities.

The Western power mainly selected the areas on the river banks for its commercial significance

and military convenience. In these areas, foreign powers began to establish isolated communities

under their extraterritorial protection and cast on lifestyle in their home country. Eventually,

although distant from the local population, these “Concessions” or “Settlements,” in places like

Shanghai, became the centers of modern urbanization from which contemporary Western ideas

and technologies were disseminated. When protected by the daunting battleships on the river, a

Westernized community emerged within the Chinese traditions of city planning, only to be

divided by an inner-city border defended by heavily armed guards. The radical dissimilarity

between a Chinese household guided under the teachings of Confucius and a Western lifestyle

evincing the benefits of capitalism injected even more compelling momentum to the Chinese

society for its later transformation. The buildings in the Western-imposed styles, as solidified

embodiments of this flagrant declaration of military and social superiority, only aggravated an

ambivalent perception of Western architecture in China. Nonetheless, the conceptualization of

modernism and internationalism relative to China’s own modern architectural exploration was
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interpreted to constitute the origins of Chinese modernization, prefacing the country’s struggle to

find its unexampled approach to architectural development in years to come.4

4
By the late 1920s, Western and Chinese scholars have already recognized the international treaty port as the
origin point of “modern style” architecture in China. See, e.g., Jun Tong 童寯, Tongjun Wenji 童寯文集
[Writings of Jun Tong], vol. 1, 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2006), 1-26.