Accommodating Reform: International Hotels and Architecture in China, 1978-1990

Accommodating Reform traces the development of international hotel architecture in early Reform-era China (1978-90). International hotels lay at the core of China’s efforts to spur economic development while limiting the potential for political destabilization. In theory, these spaces offered new, liberalized environments through which foreign capital, ideas, and expertise could be safely decanted over time. In practice, they heralded a series of dramatic ideological and operational transformations that opened China’s major cities, reshaped its built environment, and set the stage for future growth. As physical embodiments of the unprecedented economic engagements taking place, international hotel designs offer insight into the ways Chinese officials, architects, and planners worked to define, articulate, and control the contours of the country’s new agenda.

Curated by architectural historian and Hong Kong University professor Cole Roskam, the exhibition focuses on a number of iconic projects which together capture a vibrant if uncertain era of artistic, architectural, and intellectual exploration. These include the Jianguo Hotel in Beijing, designed and developed by Clement Chen & Associates in 1982; I.M. Pei’s Fragrant Hills Hotel, completed in 1982; the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, designed and built by the Guangzhou Design Institute in 1983; and the Shanghai Centre, designed by Portman and Associates and completed in 1990, among others. The exhibition contains models, plans, photographs, ephemera, and artworks related to these projects, consolidated and presented in one exhibition for the first time. Together, these works offer an opportunity to better understand a particularly meaningful moment in China’s history of Reform and Opening, and how buildings mediate our relationship to economic and political change more generally.