In 1956 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was invited to China as part of an official Austrian delegation of professionals to learn about the progress of the young Communist country. Apart from Schütte-Lihotzky as the architect, a geographer and his wife, a national economist, an artist, an art historian/sinologist, and two zoologists traveled to five cities in five weeks in September and October 1956. The travel itinerary consisted of joint trips and individual arrangements according to the individual professions. The sites of interest – most likely selected by the host, the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries – consisted mainly of places displaying the country’s recent developments like factories, universities, and a cultural program including a huge political rally on Tiananmen Square.
As a result of this trip, Schütte-Lihotzky adapted the newly gained insights and impressions of China’s progress in regard to urban planning and architecture in the book “China’s megacities. A visual travel diary,” only being published post mortem in 2007. The small book not only gives an impression of the on-going debates and conflicts that arose in urban planning during the first decade of the newly established nation-state, but is a firm testament of how Schütte-Lihotzky adored the urban structure of old Beijing and its courtyard houses by referring to it as “one of the most beautiful cities in the world – and as the biggest garden city of the world.” (Zogmayer/Schütte-Lihotzky, 2007:37)

A member of the Austrian Communist Party and having been part of designing and building the Socialist culture of the Soviet Union almost two decades earlier, Schütte-Lihotzky enthusiastically recognized the social improvements that had taken place since her first visit in 1934. It was specifically the “women’s cause” she cared about and made contact with the Chinese Communist Women’s Federation during her stay. Besides the manuscript, Schütte-Lihotzky published a number of articles and held public lectures in Vienna promoting what she had experienced and also keeping correspondence with her Chinese hosts from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Beijing. These articles were not restricted to architecture or matters of urban planning but in one case pointed out the changed situation of women under Communist rule.

In her designs, Schütte-Lihotzky was a true rationalist from the very beginning. Convinced of modernist principles like the need for standardization and efficiency, she used Taylorist studies for designing the infamous Frankfurt kitchen. The tone of her writing and projects reflects this attitude of a simple approach always following the logic of a functional argument and being strictly straight forward, never giving herself away to any hint of artistic self expression.
It might have been the logic, coherence, and historical typification of traditional Chinese architecture and towns that affected Schütte-Lihotzky in such a way to speak almost romantically about Beijing as a garden city and the advantages of the spread out courtyard houses, which was very unlike her. Laying out the various opinions of how to rebuild China’s old cities, Schütte-Lihotzky pleaded for a preservation of “this giant garden city with its wonderful silhouettes of walls, doors, and rolling rooftops” (Zogmayer/Schütte-Lihotzky, 2007:37).
In an eight page long section she addresses the traditional Chinese single-story courtyard house in detail, highlighting the calmness of the courtyards. This was a feature of primarily antique housing types, which reminded her of the quiet cloisters of medieval convents, a quality that in her opinion has wrongly been abandoned in modern architecture. “The more collectivist our life becomes,” she argues, the faster “architects and urban planners should be agonizing, where and how spaces of quiet and concentration could be created within big cities, as well individually in the context of housing, as well collectively within public buildings like libraries, museums, pools, etc.” (Ibid 52) Otherwise “the accelerated pace of work and traffic” could lead to “a nervous breakdown and an intellectual scantiness sealing the fate of the peoples.” (Ibid 52)

The challenges of 1956 Beijing, according to Schütte-Lihotzky who was also a member of the Austrian CIAM group, were to breathe life into the newly built satellite towns surrounding Beijing by providing not only sufficient housing but also an adequate number of educational and cultural facilities. Within the old city of Beijing the question of how taller buildings were to be integrated into the low rising existing urban fabric posed the main dispute among architects and urban planners at the time of Schütte-Lihotzky’s visit. During the trip, Schütte-Lihotzky met with a number of leading planners, among them the architects Yang Tingbao and Hoa Leon, the heads of construction in Shanghai and Beijing, the director of the Architectural Society of China in Beijing, and two professors from Tongji University who had studied in Vienna.

In face of the timeliness of the debate, Schütte-Lihotzky proclaimed her own opinion on the matter. While the low-rise principle of the existing garden city should categorically be preserved, the deficient infrastructure and poor condition of the courtyard houses would allow renovation, but instead a new modern type of the courtyard house was to be developed, carefully introduced with necessary taller buildings that would not destroy the harmony and elegance of the existing settlements and would not alter the proportion of the area covered by buildings and open space.

The 1957 edition of the magazine “Werk und Zeit” from the German Werkbund published a housing project for Beijing by one of its members, architect Werner Hebebrand. Hebebrand and Schütte-Lihotzky had worked together in Frankfurt under Ernst May and later both followed him to Moscow. Hebebrand traveled to China shortly after Schütte-Lihotzky and published a proposal for a new low-rise housing typology for China.

Schütte-Lihotzky’s interest in bamboo as a building material is not given much attention in the manuscript. During her trip in 1934 she already started taking a series of pictures of bamboo furniture, particularly stools and baby strollers. On the 1956 trip Schütte-Lihotzky shifted her focus on this subject matter from a mere traditional or vernacular use towards how bamboo was – and could be –utilized in modern building construction. A number of pictures of fences, roof construction, and a mention of bamboo-enforced concrete give evidence of her engagement with this old material. (CL)


Sources:
Zogmayer, Karin (Ed.) /Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete (2007): Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin (1958). Springer:Wien, NY.
Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete. Archival Material. Estate Margarete Schütte Lihotzky. University of Applied Arts Vienna.