The Seduction of Place by Joseph Rykwert

Author:Joseph Rykwert [Rykwert, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5172-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Stalin’s regime and his taste survived World War II. Yet when the Chinese Communists were secure enough to build, the direction they would take was not clear. There was no established style, nor had the Chinese Communist party ever taken much interest in such matters. Yet the Revolution had to be seen as working from a center. Beijing, the Chinese capital city, is very ancient, and had been rebuilt on a modified grid plan by the traditionalist Ming emperors after 1402. Such grid planning had been practiced in China since the second millennium B.C.—if not earlier. Although Beijing is in the far north of the country, near the Great Wall—a position that is now seen as very problematic for the geography of the empire—the site was very acceptable to the all-powerful geomancers, the practitioners of that Feng-shui which has become so fashionable nowadays all over the world. The Forbidden City, the Imperial residence in Beijing, occupied much of the middle of the square now called the Manchu quarter. To the south of it was the fortified suburb known as the Chinese section; each one was walled.

The Forbidden City had also once been fully surrounded by moats and walls. Designed as the Imperial residence and the seat of the Imperial administration, it was occupied by the emperor and his court by 1422. The last Qing or Manchu ruler, the Xuantong emperor, Pu Yi, resided there until 1924 even though he had been deposed in 1910. The outer gate, through which the emperor—who rarely left the Forbidden City—used to be ceremoniously taken to the Temple of Heaven for the great solstice sacrifices, opens beyond the moat onto the square to the south. Over the gate before which the new Communist leader proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949, you may still—at the time of writing—see about the last publicly displayed portrait of Chairman Mao.

What was once a wide avenue called Tiananmen—after that southern Gate of Heavenly Peace—had offices or ministries grouped on either side (as on the Washington Mall, or in Whitehall in London). The ministries of Rites, of Works, War, and Astronomy were on the east, of Justice, Sacrifices, and the Court of Censorship on the west. After the Revolution, the offices were pulled down and the avenue enlarged to create the new hundred-acre Tiananmen Square. The authorities wanted to exploit the occasion and to assert the nature of their power through a series of very visible buildings that would also provide a model for all building in the New China. This happened a century and a half after Washington had been built on virgin territory, but with analogous ambitions.

While the Revolution was “traditional” in some literary ways—the granite obelisk that was set up to commemorate its heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square, for instance, is inscribed on the side facing the Forbidden City with a poem in Mao’s beautifully flowing calligraphy—the country had no architectural “style” or even canonic buildings to which the architects could appeal. During the Great Leap

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