Building hereness: Mao's ‘Design Revolution’ and the question of socialist modernity

This article rediscovers a rarely studied episode in socialist architectural history — the Design Revolution (DR) campaign in China from the mid-1960s to the late 70s. The introduction outlines the spiritual and institutional isomorphism between modern design and the international socialist project in the twentieth century — both grounded in future-oriented blueprints that can enable, yet also potentially repress, human creativity. This situates the DR within an appropriate theoretical framework of socialist politics. Drawing on multiple historical sources, the author presents the DR as an instance of self-reflection on the duality inherent in both design and socialist politics. The article consists of two parts. Part I reconstructs the historical context of the DR as a practice-oriented epistemological campaign that emerged from Mao Zedong's critique of the centralised Soviet techno-political system imported into China. It interprets the principles and reasoning underlying the DR, which can be summarised as the overcoming of three divisions: design/construction, theory/practice, and mental labour/manual labour. Part II examines the May 7 Commune in Shanghai (1967–1976), a paradigmatic example of the DR. The commune was formed by dismantling an architectural school, a municipal construction company, and a design institute, then reintegrating them into a single experimental unit. The author analyses its practices of ‘on-site’ design and textbook editing, its worker–student model, and its ‘designing-by-constructing’ work style. Finally, the article demonstrates how studying the DR offers deeper insight into socialist modernity and its internal tensions — tensions that come into especially sharp relief in non-Western contexts through a historically situated praxis, which both defined the ethos of the campaign and rearticulated modernity's universalism from within.