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Beijing Institute of Architectural Design 北京市建築設計研究院有限公司
Zhang Bo 張鎛
Exterior view of the Great Hall of the People 人民大會堂外觀
1959
The Great Hall of the People opened in September 1959 as one of the Ten Great Buildings commemorating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Located on the western side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the massive structure—which measures over 170,000 square metres—was realised in just ten months by nearly eight thousand workers. The state-run Beijing Institute of Architectural Design was responsible for executing project drawings after a rapid competition and review process, which synthesised approaches from multiple proposals. Despite its mix of stylistic references, the scale and breakneck construction of the Great Hall of the People consolidated a clear and powerful statement on the collectivisation of China’s resources as the government began the Great Leap Forward. The design also responded to Premier Zhou Enlai’s call for the building to ‘express greatness with reason, project humanism, and be inclusive’, to encapsulate ‘the broad mind of a proletarian and the all-encompassing spirit of an internationalist’.
The building blends a neoclassical arrangement of space with Chinese elements, such as the elevated platform suggesting traditional xumizuo and the golden yellow tiles on the slightly raised eaves visible in this exterior photograph. Rows of imposing columns line the symmetrical facades; these were meant to evoke the pillars of the nearby Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City. The colonnade of the Great Hall of the People is characterised by different spacing between columns, with the widest spacing at the centre, a strategy in traditional Chinese architecture used to indicate hierarchy. On the east side, the entrance appears under a large red emblem signifying the PRC. Inside, meeting rooms accommodate government ceremonies and assemblies, including the National People’s Congress. The largest of these, a multi-tiered auditorium designed to seat ten thousand people, occupies the building’s centre. The photograph is meticulously hand coloured and is part of a series collected in a presentation album, published by the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House on the occasion of the building’s completion.
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