ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how architecture was rationalized in the construction of socialist modernity by investigating into three processes in the evolution of Cold War modernism in China: searching for national forms during the encounters with socialist realism, localizing standardized housing design through urban and rural practices, and the development of modern Lingnan architecture by assembling regional knowledge. It shows that Cold War modernism in China was more than merely a static product shaped by the political goals of the superpower or the economic aims of the socialist state. It proposes an alternative methodological approach which allows a more dynamic and integrative historical investigation into Cold War modernism by examining the global actualizations of architectural modernism as continuously shifting assemblages of heterogeneous elements and multiple determinations. The findings provide fresh insights on how Chinese modernism evolved through complex discursive and material processes in which a constellation of global, national, regional, and local elements intersected in historically contiguous ways. The study contributes to a novel approach to Cold War modernism by going beyond historiographical and geopolitical reductionism.
