Constructing a new domestic discourse: the modern home in architectural journals and mass-market texts in early twentieth-century China

Abstract

This paper explores how changing ideals of the modern home were articulated in China's architectural journals and mass-market texts during the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which many Chinese cities experienced increasing housing shortages for the working poor along with changing expectations of ‘contemporary’ dwellings for middle-income urbanites.1 More specifically, I examine how the design of residential houses and domestic arrangements became a subject of intellectual and political concern for architects and cultural intermediaries. By tracing the competing moral claims ascribed to the modern home through these writings, I illustrate their shifting assumptions about the ‘social role’ of architecture in the Chinese context. I argue that whilst these critiques were closely related to those in Europe and elsewhere, they were specific responses to accelerating capitalist urbanisation in China and were undergirded by a shared anxiety among Chinese elites and professional experts to institute an authentic modern design culture. Central to their efforts was the belief that well-designed dwellings would not only help to improve the lives of Chinese citizens, but also transform their everyday habits and develop China into a more ‘civilised’, healthy and productive nation. While modern architecture was promoted by architects as a key means to modernisation and social betterment, they debated the suitability and appropriateness of forms, aesthetics and domestic arrangements for the Chinese population, often selectively linking particular designs with (progressive) values that defined modernism in Western contexts as well as those associated with ‘Chinese culture and tradition’. Meanwhile, these expressions were utilised by those in building trades to encourage consumption for the home by projecting imaginaries of modern domestic life that did not always correspond with those of intellectual elites.These explorations, which build on expanding scholarship on modern architectural history in China, will contribute to a fuller understanding of the contradictory perspectives of architecture and domesticity in an unsettling period characterised by simmering social discontent and emerging nationalism. The attention to lesser-known, and arguably collectively important, figures in this study will elucidate the multifarious exchange of knowledge between different factions of architects and institutions beyond the familiar ones represented in existing historiography.2 Finally, the illustration of concerted attention to the problem of the home in this period will underscore the significance of domesticity in the construction of architectural discourse, which is an aspect that has been largely eschewed in the writings of modern architectural history.