Designing Reform

“A timely contribution, helping us grasp how the shift in Sino–U.S. relations facilitated architectural engagement between the two countries and reshaped architectural production in China during this period.”—Guanghui Ding, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

“Impeccably researched, Designing Reform is a groundbreaking study of architecture in contemporary China that provides firm grounds for further scholarship.”—Vladimir Kulić, author of Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980

“Cole Roskam’s study offers a window into an important transitional period in both Chinese architecture and history, convincingly tying architectural production to shifts and subtleties of policy.”—Alan Plattus, Yale University

“In this remarkable volume, Cole Roskam illuminates the role architecture and building played in the crucial two decades just before, and just after, China’s turn toward reform and opening. Roskam provides a compelling history-based argument about architecture and social change, as well as the depth and context that allow us to look at buildings we have long taken for granted and see them with a fresh eye.”—Barry Naughton, University of California, San Diego

“Roskam combines an architectural historian’s attention to detail with a sinologist’s political acumen to give us a lucid and fascinating backstory of China’s consequential twenty-first century return to the world stage.”—Shiqiao Li, University of Virginia