ABSTRACT
Considering the National Style of the 1950s as a communist project, a Soviet-influenced style, or a personal drama of Liang Sicheng, current scholarship has underestimated the importance of a thinking practice of the time for architecture of modern China. This chapter aims to rectify the situation. Analyzing critical cases, it uncovers a tripartite framework involving ideology, historiography, and design; and relations between power and knowledge, history and design, and vision and form. With this, it situates the decade in a context of Maoism, Soviet classicism, and European culture, as well as domestic professional developments before and, importantly, after the 1950s.
