AA alumna Jingru Cyan Cheng has received a commendation in the RIBA President's Award for Research 2020 in the History and Theory category for her project 'Alternative modernism: the architecture of China's people's commune'. A synopsis of the project has now been published in the RIBA Journal.

Cyan introduces the project: “I’ve been looking at this 1958 commune poster for quite some time. It renders so lively a past vision of a particular future during China’s rising tide of national collectivisation. It leads me to learn about an alternative model of modernisation – the People’s Commune.” The research argues that the people’s commune challenges preconceptions of Western modernism that are based on the construct of the individual and the nuclear family and their relationships with the civil society. It is thus constitutive to the non-canonical architectural histories. Moreover, the creation and spatialisation of collective subjectivities – which are hinged on a social contract underpinned by social and work security – anticipate, to an extent, the ongoing changes in contemporary societies, the integration of production and reproduction, intergenerational living and non-familial social networks of care, among others.

Regarding further development of the work, Cyan commented: “I am greatly indebted to people who generously shared their life stories with me, especially members from the then Shigushan Brigade, Fenghuang People’s Commune. I look forward to resuming many conversations through a documentary-fiction filmmaking project, Ripple, Ripple, Rippling, with Chen Zhan and with the support from Driving the Human.”

Read more in the RIBA Journal.

Image: People's Communes are Good, poster of the Hongqi People’s Commune, 1958. Designer: Guangting Rui. Publisher: Shanghai Educational Publishing House