Beijing's Eclectic Edifices

摘要

The diverse styles of Beijing's Olympic buildings have a precedent in the Chinese government's construction programme of 1959. Historical Chinese architecture, Soviet functionality and Western modernism were fused in the eclectic edifices built to celebrate 10 years of communist China. The main railway station (right) was one of the 10 buildings in the capital. In a new book, Modernism in China, Wiley, ￡45) Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren show how modernist design flourished in the 1930s in the French, British and American settlements of the wealthy treaty port of Shanghai and then under Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945.