Canadian Centre For Architecture / Centre Canadien Darchitecture

This is an audio-introduction to the exhibition How Modern, on view at CCA from 20 November 2025 to 5 April 2026.   The exhibition How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949-1979, produced and curated in collaboration with M+ Museum in Hong Kong, reconsiders these assumptions. The exhibition takes the multimedia documentation of architectural production under the socialist Chinese regime as a point of departure, illuminating specific social and cultural microhistories that are not evident in purely textual historical sources. These social biographies of projects—characterized by material and technical inventiveness, continuities and discontinuities with social, economic, and political inclinations, and direct and indirect influences from within and beyond the Eastern bloc—challenge prevailing assessments of design and architectural practice in Mao's China as monolithic, hermetic, and autocratic. Examining more nuanced histories and narratives behind projects from the undocumented perspectives of de