• 3 This letter is undated, but it was likely written by Schütte-Lihotzky as she sorted her archive, w (...)
• 4 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Schema für Kindergarten System, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1946,” Vienna (Austr (...)
• 5 For literature on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s activism as a political dissident and her time in i (...)
• 6 The Austrian Holocaust historian and Resistance Studies scholar Gerhard Botz distinguishes between (...)

1“Dear Colleague, May I turn to you to ask for a favor,” wrote the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in a letter to an unnamed female Bulgarian architect, likely in the early 1980s.3 In the letter Schütte-Lihotzky explained that she was desperate to obtain documentation of buildings based on her Kindergarten System, a modular architectural system of plans she designed for the municipality of Sofia, Bulgaria, between 1945 and 1947.4 It was during this time, immediately following World War II, that she was able to reunite with her husband, Wilhelm Schütte, after being imprisoned for more than four years for her participation in the Communist Resistance against the Nazi regime.5 Her engagement in what Holocaust and Resistance Studies scholars have coined “collective opposition to the system” and the solidarity which she experienced among female dissidents during internment made her acutely aware of the risks involved in the labor of political resistance and activism.6 It also impressed upon her the power of feminist strategies of uplift as well as architectural and political narratives of new beginnings.

• 7 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Programm zur Schaffung eines Zentral-Bau-Instituts für Kinderanstalte (...)
• 8 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Peter Noever and Renate Allmayer-Beck (eds.), Margarete Schütte-Lihotz (...)
• 9 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Bauten für Kinder: Referat gehalten von Architektin Grete Schütte-Lih (...)
• 10 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was elected the first president of the Bund Demokratischer Frauen Öster (...)

2Indeed, by the late 1940s, Schütte-Lihotzky had dedicated herself fully to bettering the lives of women while arguing for the transformational potential of design. Positing that the advancement of women would benefit society at large, she wrote of her Kindergarten System in Sofia, “The growing percentage of the Bulgarian women in production and in all sectors of the public life of the country will make the establishment of children’s institutions increasingly important in the coming years.”7 Children’s institutions, she contended, could contribute to women’s upward social mobility and their success in the workforce. Upon returning to Vienna in 1947, she helped prepare a national meeting of the International Congress of Modern Architecture in Austria (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, or ciam).8 In her lecture for a meeting of the ciam Austria, which took place in 1951, she insisted that Austria was a country of women because it had been reconstructed by women.9 As the newly elected president of the Federation of Democratic Women (Bund demokratischer Frauen Österreichs, bdfö), she further asserted that women were to be the guardians of not only the postwar neutrality of Austria but also peace across Europe.10 By the early 1950s, it thus seemed as if Schütte-Lihotzky had brought into alignment ideas about architecture, feminism, and the emerging international movement for peace and equality in Europe.

• 11 The majority of the literature on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s design work focuses on her achievem (...)
• 12 For a nuanced account of Schütte-Lihotzky’s work in Turkey see, for example, Bernd Nicolai, Modern (...)
• 13 In her work on Carola Bloch, Mary Pepchinsky was the first scholar to discuss Schütte-Lihotzky’s p (...)

3Today Schütte-Lihotzky’s work has been canonized in the history of architecture for her interwar contributions to modern housing and educational institutions in the cities of Vienna and Frankfurt, most notably her design of the Frankfurt Kitchen.11 Over the past decade, scholars have thoughtfully considered her collectivized kindergartens and nurseries designed in the Soviet Union as well as her plans for rural schools in Turkey in the 1930s.12 Yet only the most recent scholarship has highlighted that Schütte-Lihotzky’s architectural and political efforts spanned more than eight decades. She was actively involved in the Communist Resistance in the 1940s, as well as the Austrian women’s movement, the international peace movement, and organizational labor for architectural associations, such as ciam and the Union of International Architects (uia).13 This historical and historiographical gap can be attributed to Schütte-Lihotzky’s position of marginality in postwar architectural discourse: an aging woman, a former resistance fighter, a communist, and a fearless activist.

• 14 New research by Monika Platzer has shown that Schütte-Lihotzky was part of a number of exhibitions (...)
• 15 For a nuanced reflection of Franz Schuster and Roland Rainer, for example, see Monika Platzer, Geg (...)

4By the 1950s, indeed, her position and cultural, political, and financial capital in Vienna had drastically changed. Schütte-Lihotzky’s letter of the early 1980s to the unnamed Bulgarian colleague was a reflection of the many years she had lived in a conservative architectural and institutional world in Austria. While she had worked for the Viennese municipality in the 1920s with kindred thinkers such as the architect Josef Frank and the Austro-Marxist economist Otto Neurath, some thirty years later she was excluded from civic commissions and exhibitions, even though it was a time of vast rebuilding efforts. Exhibitions such as The Woman and her Dwelling (Die Frau und ihre Wohnung, 1950) and Social Culture of Living (Soziale Wohnkultur, 1952) focused on her realm of expertise, but she was not invited.14 Other colleagues joined the ranks of the Viennese municipality as city architects, advancing despite and even because of their age and experience.15 Schütte-Lihotzky, however, an expert on dwellings and educational buildings with a wide range of built work all across Europe, was granted only two substantial commissions by the Social Democratic municipality between the 1950s and the 1980s.

• 16 Oliver Rathkolb, “Kalter Krieg und politische Propaganda in Österreich,” in Michael Hansel and Mic (...)
• 17 In the late 1940s and 1950s, Austrian politicians and the Austrian public utilized the so-called v (...)
• 18 Schütte-Lihotzky personally experienced being ostracized from the architectural community, stating (...)
• 19 One of the defining historiographical characteristics that emerged when revisiting the role of fem (...)
• 20 On multiple occasions Schütte-Lihotzky insisted that she was always interested in the built dimens (...)

5Against the backdrop of a growing Cold War divide, the Social Democratic Party of Austria, for which, according to historian Oliver Rathkolb, was “extremely pro-western” and ideologically “stringently anti-communist,” was wary of employing a female communist.16 In postwar Vienna, in fact, former Nazis retained or quickly re-entered municipal positions of power and not only actively ostracized resistance fighters but in some cases explicitly targeted them as proof of the persistently perpetuated postwar lie of Austria as the “Nazis’ first victim.”17 For Schütte-Lihotzky this meant grave isolation from the architectural and intellectual communities to which she belonged. By 1976, she wrote that despite being a “female expert in housing” she had been officially “sidelined by the municipality.”18 It was only in her capacity as president of the bdfö, the women’s organization of the Communist Party of Austria, that she was able to envision an alternative career as a writer, political organizer, and feminist activist. This role allowed her to travel widely in the socialist and communist world.19 And it enabled Schütte-Lihotzky, who never considered herself a writer, to produce new work in architecture as criticism, theory, and architectural photography.20

• 21 Marcel Bois’s work focusses on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky as a communist intellectual. He therefor (...)
• 22 Sibel Bozdoğan, “Nationalizing the Modern House: Regionalism Debates and Emigré Architects in Earl (...)
• 23 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edit (...)
• 24 Edward Said, “Freedom from Domination in the Future: Movement and Migrations,” op. cit. (note 2), (...)
• 25 Ibid., p. 335-336.
• 26 Ibid.
• 27 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 575-599.

6Her relative isolation in Austria, however, was why historian Marcel Bois, in the first scholarly assessment of Schütte-Lihotzky’s postwar work, argues that her life in Austria after 1945 could be characterized as a “second exile,” the result of her status as a “communist intellectual.”21 In this paper, I acknowledge Bois’s critical evocation of “second exile,” while drawing attention to architectural historian Sibel Bozdoğan’s reminder of the distinction between “émigré” and “exile” in the writing of Edward Said.22 While emigration, according to Said, means to leave one’s home behind, exile implies that what was once home has forever disappeared.23 Said subsequently noted that overcoming the love for a single place on earth was a struggle for liberation.24 “The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner,” Said noted, evoking the twelfth-century monk, Saint Victor.25 “He to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place.”26 I want to place this idea of viewing the entire world as a foreign place in conversation with a feminist perspective of situated knowledges and partial perspectives proposed by Donna Haraway, which describes “a more adequate, richer, better account of the world in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination.”27 Keeping in mind these two propositions, which take instability, transience, and the resistance to boundedness and fixities as their fundamental points of departure, I discuss if and how we can consider Schütte-Lihotzky’s exile and travel—beyond their content—as a feminist practice of seeing.

• 28 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin, e (...)
• 29 See Katia Frey and Eliana Perotti’s work on female urban theorists' role in modern city planning, (...)
• 30 Esra Akcan, who first discussed Schütte-Lihotzky’s work in Turkey in great detail, noted that her (...)

7The experiences of exile and travel, indeed, collided in two extended trips Schütte-Lihotzky made to China in 1934 and 1956, which she reflected upon in the book manuscript entitled Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin (China’s Million Cities: Picture and Travel Diary of a Female Architect) in 1958.28 In this essay, I focus on these trips and the book manuscript in an effort to shift architectural history’s emphasis on and discursive fascination with Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchens to an exploration of complex cultural and political questions about urbanism, feminism, and activism in the postwar years.29 Building on recent scholarship, which has considered Schütte-Lihotzky’s activities beyond Austria and Germany, I pursue the manifold links between her political and design work in China—first in the Republic of China (roc) in 1934 and then the People’s Republic of China (prc) in 1956. I highlight her role as one of the few émigré architects who questioned “smooth translations,” to use architectural historian Esra Akcan’s term, while I acknowledge her complicity in vast “developmental” undertakings in the Soviet Union and China at a moment of great urban transformation.30

• 31 The Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries was, as the name su (...)
• 32 Donna Mehos and Suzanne Moon, “The Uses of Portability: Circulating Experts in the Technopolitics (...)
• 33 I use the term “multiple modernities” as a reference to Edward Denison’s work, who builds on Shmue (...)
• 34 Many of the architectural diaries, which turned architectural travel guides, are marred with the e (...)

8Throughout the essay, moreover, I want to offer two glimpses into distinct global geo-spatial imaginaries that coincided with China’s efforts to build relationships with “foreign countries.”31 The first foregrounds the quasi-colonial practices of Austrian, German, Swiss, and Dutch architects in the Soviet Union and China in the 1930s, which were part and parcel of advancing Europe’s violent “civilizing mission” before the Second World War. These histories are complicated by the rise of fascism, including China’s New Life Movement, and many European architects’ own precarious conditions of exile and emigration in the late 1930s. The second discussion examines architects as “circulating experts” in the postwar context yet situates the question of “expertise building” in the communist and non-aligned world.32 By looking at the specific condition of China’s own efforts to increase “exchanges” with countries abroad, I argue, we can study flows of power and influence that were not always one directional and indeed bound up with multifaceted challenges about the potentials of communist internationalism and the dangers of overt state propaganda. Yet which perspectives and histories did communist internationalism truly offer a European woman, even if she was aware of how imperialism and colonialism had affected China? For someone who had fought totalitarianism elsewhere, was there an accessible path to understanding multiple modernities in China? Could a privileged white designer escape essentializing views about a richly diverse country, with a complex and rapidly changing urban history if only known to them through travel?33 These complicated questions, which characterized a number of European architects’ diaries and manuals from the 1920s to the 1960s, became bound up in Schütte-Lihotzky’s manuscript Millionenstädte Chinas.34

• 35 For those Chinese who were born before 1949 and moved to Taiwan after 1949, we followed the Wade-G (...)
• 36 See, for example, Federica Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement at War: Wartime Mobilisation and State (...)
• 37 See Frederic Wakeman, “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism,” The China Qua (...)
• 38 See the full speech in President Chiang Kai-shek’s Selected Speeches and Messages, 1937-1945, Nanj (...)
• 39 The kmt began to receive aid from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s.

9When Schütte-Lihotzky visited the roc for the first time between May and June 1934, she was invited as a foreign architectural expert on behalf of a Chinese educational delegation working for the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or kmt) under the politician and military leader Chiang Kai-shek [蒋介石].35 The year 1934 was a critical moment of modernization debates in the kmt, as it marked the emergence of the New Life Movement [新生活运动].36 Incorporating principles of Christianity with Confucianism under a proto-nationalist agenda, the New Life Movement opposed both communism and liberalism. East Asian historians have suggested that the New Life Movement represented a form of “Confucian fascism,” a pivot to far-right mobilization efforts with severe ramifications for everyday life and the law.37 Chiang Kai-shek’s political doctrines of “proper rite, justice, honesty, and shame,” formulated in September of 1934, for example, prompted the reformulation of policies for sanitation, health, and education (most of them eventually unrealized).38 With poverty still sweeping the country and against the backdrop of growing communist support within China among students and an impending Japanese invasion, the kmt was hard-pressed to recruit specialists from foreign countries, including the Soviet Union.39

• 40 For a discussion of the May Brigade in the Soviet Union, see Thomas Flierl, “‘Possibly the Greates (...)
• 41 Also see Thomas Flierl, Standardstädte: Ernst May in der Sowjetunion 1930-1933: Texte und Dokument (...)
• 42 In an interview with Chup Friemert in the introduction to Schütte-Lihotzky’s Memories of the Resis (...)

10In 1934 Schütte-Lihotzky and her husband, Wilhelm Schütte, were both living in Moscow and were part of a group of European architects—the May Brigade—who worked with German planner Ernst May on a number of vast urban and infrastructural projects in the Soviet Union.40 Schütte-Lihotzky, thirty-seven years old, oversaw a unit within a trust named Standartgorprojekt [Стандартгорпроект], tasked with the standardization of dozens of factory kindergartens, while her husband was responsible for school design (fig. 3).41 She travelled widely from Moscow to many parts of the Soviet Union during this time and identified with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s expansive domestic “civilizing mission” (although she was not a party member), an undertaking that was extremely profitable for foreign architects invited to the Soviet Union.42 As articulated in letters and diary entries, she was fascinated by the vast construction efforts and remained uncritical of the extraction of labor and resources from local populations. In 1933, in a letter from the Ural Mountains to her sister, Adele Hanakam, in Vienna, she conveyed her experience of planning the city of Magnitogorsk:

• 44 Schütte-Lihotzky often referred to this idea. In the postwar years, she would insist, like Engels (...)

In line with the view of many of her colleagues—and most Soviet planners and politicians—she considered herself part of an immense “developmental” undertaking that ushered in the modernization of the country under the auspices of the Five-Year Plan. Having moved from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1930, she affirmed both state planners’ and the expats’ versions of “development,” under the banner of alleviating “the plight of working class.”44

• 45 Wilhelm Schütte first met the educational delegation in Germany. See Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, E (...)
• 46 For general information about this trip, see Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Col (...)

11At the invitation of a kmt educational delegation to the Soviet Union in 1934, both Schütte-Lihotzky and her husband agreed to participate in the roc’s projected modernization program and to apply their knowledge in kindergarten and school design respectively.45 While they declined the offer to work in the roc permanently—likely for political reasons, as I will further outline below—Schütte-Lihotzky agreed she would draft and present recommendations for the design and construction of children’s institutions during an extended tour through the country.46 Under this purview, during a six-week trip she captured observations in a personal written and photographic diary. This visual and textual document focused on the themes of kindergarten, nursery, and school design, and how addressing standardization would allow rapid modernization while retaining regional specificity. The observations were meant to inform written recommendations advanced to the kmt at the end of the trip as well.

• 47 For a description of Taut’s first arrival in Japan and his correspondence with Shimomura Shōtarō (...)
• 48 Ueno’s 1948 book タウト著作集 (Taut Collection), dedicated in part to the question of settlements (ジードルン (...)
• 49 Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil, op. cit. (note 12).

12Before embarking on the official visit to the roc, however, in April of 1934 the couple traveled with the trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok and then by steamship to Japan, with a stop in Korea. Reaching Kyōto on May 3, they arrived in time to celebrate the birthday of their colleague and friend, the architect Bruno Taut. In Kyōto Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte stayed with Bruno and Erica Taut, who lived permanently at the home of Shimomura Shōtarō [下村正太郎], an architectural connoisseur and businessman and the president of the upscale Daimaru department store.47 In the following days, the two couples went on a number of short trips, at times accompanied by Japanese architect Ueno Isaburō [上野伊三郎] and another foreign design expert, Mr. Wilson (fig. 4).48 Their visits to temples, palaces, and shrines and their extensive travel through the Japanese countryside were signs of the group’s privilege and the capital both couples had at their disposal. Yet the possibility of spending time together was unique and precarious, since the Tauts had been forced to flee Nazi prosecution in Germany in 1933 and had already been living in exile in Japan for months. When Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte were forced to emigrate in 1937, Taut took it upon himself to find work for them in Turkey.49

• 50 For literature on Bruno Taut and the Berliner Gross-Siedlungen, see Franziska Bollery and Kristian (...)
• 51 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Von Moskau nach Japan und China und 22 Jahre später das zweite Mal,” (...)
• 52 I do not mention Taut and Schütte-Lihotzky’s shared views as an attempt to trace flows of influenc (...)
• 53 Bruno Taut, Bruno Taut in Japan, op. cit. (note 47), p. 48. “Doch wenn ich nachher die kopierten P (...)
• 54 Bruno Taut, Bruno Taut in Japan, op. cit. (note 47), vol. 2, p. 140.

13Since their time in Germany, Schütte-Lihotzky and Taut had shared a number of political and architectural interests and perspectives, including an attention to the social and lived dimension of design and urbanism (fig. 5). They were both astute observers of the material world and had been committed to settlement housing in the 1920s, in particular the creation of standardized building elements based on proven typologies in workers’ dwellings.50 Accordingly, throughout the trip in Japan, Schütte-Lihotzky was fascinated by tatami mats, which she understood as modular measurements made form. She was intrigued by the fact that they differed from place to place and that their dimensions had changed over time; as such, they were distinct from “the abstract theoretical meter,” she wrote in her travel observations.51 Similarly, in his 1937 book, Das japanische Haus und sein Leben (The Japanese Home and Its Home Life), Taut insisted that in illustrating Japanese architecture, he “chose subjects for photography that were not extraordinary, but something quite normal and commonplace.”52 However, Taut would sometimes follow such statements with more telling observations, such as, “when I later saw the copied pictures, I had to admit that in spite of all this it was absolutely impossible to keep my friends at home, from seeing first of all the picturesque, the unusual, and the ‘exotic.’”53 Precisely because of his colleagues’ inability to see through his eyes, Taut was wary of visitors; although he enjoyed the time with the “Schüttes,” he confessed in his diary that he wished he could spend more time with Japanese colleagues.54

• 55 During the trip Schütte-Lihotzky and Schütte also spent considerable time with Bruno Taut in Japan (...)

14While Schütte-Lihotzky’s architectural photography from the 1934 trip indicated an attempt to contextualize the vernacular architecture and cultural monuments of the past with the lived urbanism of the present, she did not abstain from provincializing written remarks. When she arrived with her husband in Beijing on May 19, she sketched and wrote hastily. In photographs and daily diary entries, she captured the 46-day trip from Beijing to Hangzhou, Shanghai, to the capital, Nanjing. In cities she documented buildings and street life, but also people, clothing, and material culture. She was most moved by the vastness, the materials, the colors, and the animation of Chinese landscapes. Yet upon their return, she assembled the pictures according to rubrics and taxonomies.55

• 57 Claire Zimmerman and Eve Zimmerman, “Ethnographic Architectural Photography: Futagawa Yukio and Ni (...)
• 58 Claire Zimmerman and Eve Zimmerman, “Ethnographic Architectural Photography,” op. cit. (note 57), (...)

As evidenced by her hollow references to “signs,” at times she ignored cultural nuances and signification. With her focus on vernacular landscapes and material objects, this form of naturalizing culture into landscape, although laudatory in tone, performed the central tenets of the visual-textual genre of “photographic ethnographies of architecture,” a term coined by architectural historian Claire Zimmerman and Japanese Studies scholar Eve Zimmerman.57 Schütte-Lihotzky even participated in what Zimmerman and Zimmerman describe as the use of “architecture and cities or towns as evidence of the coherence of a group of people.”58 The violence with which she had described workers in the Soviet Union, now extended to architectural photography in China.

• 59 I want to thank Zheng Xiaodong for his notes on the development of Chinese kindergartens at the be (...)
• 60 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979.
• 61 Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to make out the location of the temple school depi (...)
• 62 I want to thank Lawrence Chua for his comments on this image and for reading this article in draft (...)
• 63 Girls’ schools and women’s colleges were popular in the roc, though co-education was promoted.

16As the trip was substantially shaped by tours of existing modern educational facilitates and visits to temple schools, these tendencies were most pronounced when they concerned children, particularly in rural regions, where many kids in the mid-1930s received primary education in the roc (fig. 7).59 In one of her photos Schütte-Lihotzky perpetuated one of the most vicious forms of othering as theorized by Said, as she deployed her camera against woman and children, re-inscribing structures of violence and unevenness.60 The picture captured a group of little girls with their caregivers set against a temple school, who seem to only uncomfortably pose for the photographer.61 Architectural historian Lawrence Chua, a specialist in Asian architecture and urban culture, regards this imagery as evidence of the wide-spread rural poverty plaguing China in the early 1930s.62 The neat line-up of more than forty women and children, doubtlessly compelled by the “visitors” and their accompanying government bureaucrats, likely implied at least a disruption of daily routines, potentially even intimidating to the all-female group.63 As a foreigner engaged in a vast projected “developmental” undertaking, Schütte-Lihotzky produced such imagery frequently and unquestioningly during the entirety of the trip (fig. 8).

• 65 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)

When displaying confidence as an invited “expert,” Schütte-Lihotzky had in reality only modestly prepared for the trip and had limited understanding of the actualities upon which she was asked to advise. The tightly controlled framework of the trip, with multiple schools visits a day, left little room for critical analysis.65

• 66 I want to thank Daniel Talesnik, who lectured on foreign architects in the Soviet Union and noted (...)
• 67 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Richtlinien für den Bau von Kindergärten in China,” p. 4-5. Vienna (A (...)

18At certain crucial junctures, however, she veered away from the strict universalizing assertions of standardization and claimed that local and collaborative design expertise were cornerstones for the overall success of the projects. She noted, for example, that resident architects, knowledgeable about diverse regional building techniques and existing building typologies, should lead all projects. Drawing on experience from the Soviet Union, she held that types—standardized plans and measurements for nurseries and kindergartens—had to be adapted to local building customs.66 Although she incorporated programmatic ideas she had probed in kindergarten and nursery designs in Russia—a medical station for sick children at the entrance of a kindergarten she had designed for Bryansk, for example—she argued that importing European and American building techniques should be avoided where they meant complicated and costly construction undertakings. Lastly, she focused on architecture’s relationships to existing surroundings and climate. “The old, locally customary construction, which is open to nature yet protects spaces from the sun, will have to form the basis of the architectural design without copying previous styles,” she noted, having analyzed existing courtyard typologies employed in rural school designs.67

• 68 Claire Zimmerman and Eve Zimmerman, “Ethnographic Architectural Photography,” op. cit. (note 57), (...)
• 69 See, for example, photos 265-273, Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Collection and (...)

20Through this attention to everyday life, she perceived history and culture not as something of the past, but as constantly in flux, changing, and alterable. It is what set her imagery apart from the most severe provincializing assertions of photographic ethnographies of architecture, in which “buildings serve as metonyms for the nameless people who built and inhabited them over time,” as Zimmerman and Zimmerman outline.68 Indeed, even more than musing about future school designs, she studied existing children’s furniture and play structures, as well as the landscapes of childhood as inhabited by grandparents, parents, and kids (fig. 10).69 Bent bamboo furniture for children and strollers with foldable and woven elements from split bamboo seemed to have been of particular interest to her, because they drew on local materials, proven techniques of craftsmanship, and a modern formal vocabulary (fig. 11). The theme of reconciling China’s past and present was thus prominent in her writing, and notably, in a few of her sketches as well. Through them she endeavored to gain insight about the daily experience of children and young people in educational institutions, their workplaces, and their roles in everyday life. Through her focus on the usage of everyday objects by people and through their inclusion in lively photographs, she seemed—if only for a moment—to evade otherwise pervasive forms of objectification and essentializing of people.

• 70 During the trip she spent considerable time with both the minister of education, Wang Shih-chieh, (...)
• 71 In a letter to her sister, Adele Hanakam, Schütte-Lihotzky articulated that Wilhelm Schütte was th (...)
• 72 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)
• 73 Edward Denison, Architecture and the Landscape of Modernity, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017 (...)

21Recounting receptions with local, municipal, and state officials, among them a luncheon with the minister of education, Wang Shih-chieh, and a dinner with the minister of transportation and communication, Chu Chia-hua [朱家骅], Schütte-Lihotzky further acquainted herself with modernization and education debates in the roc.70 Chu, who had received his doctorate in Berlin, insisted in a private conversation that students—from kindergartners to college students—should not spend too much time in abstract curricula or abroad.71 Rather they should be quickly tasked with the concrete objectives of building the country. “We could not agree more,” Schütte-Lihotzky noted in her diary, stressing proudly that she was the only female “expert” in the room.72 Although these debates were led in the highest echelons of society and thus cannot be understood to reflect broader societal concerns of ordinary citizens, through these discussions Schütte-Lihotzky was able to engage in existing architectural debates on modernization in the roc. According to architectural historian Edward Denison, among these were how to “pursue modernity in an urban context while retaining Chinese characteristics” and how to “reconcile a modern future with China’s past.”73 Placed before planners and architects that presented the persistent paradox of the time.

• 74 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)
• 75 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)

22Yet it appears that the experience of the sustained visit in the roc facilitated a slight rethinking of the plight of ordinary people—the porters, day laborers, and agricultural workers, whose suffering Schütte-Lihotzky perceived to be insurmountable and not sufficiently addressed by the political representatives. “A meager cow on the street, then again a large boxy building—the new court, etc., appears, then the so-called Potsdamerplatz—some shops in newer houses, more vacant lots in between, temples, then to our hotel,” she wrote, while reflecting on the discrepancy between the urban scenery and her travel to luxury hotels.74 “All austerity and all the chaos that exists in Russia,” she further asserted, “which is the byproduct of any tremendous development is generally accepted [here in China] for [the promise of] a marvelous intellectual and material development of the country—awakening of the masses.”75 This recognition of and solidarity with the plight of Chinese workers did not change the fundamentally colonial world view that structured her thinking, as is evidenced in the use of galling racial epithets in diary notes (which I have left out in the English translation). A few days before departure she described the landscape she saw from the window in transit.

• 77 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)

“In Russia, too, there is a lot of material misery,” she concluded, “but in Russia there exists a future, an awakening, a counterbalance, a[nd] means for reparation.”77

• 78 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Coll (...)
• 79 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Tagebuch MSL,” Chinareise 1934, Vienna (Austria), University of Appli (...)

23As she departed, she did grow increasingly suspicious of the fascist dimensions of the educational reforms she had herself been part of.78 “Pioneers march in the streets. All boys in schools will become pioneers starting on July 10—they participate in military exercises. Not voluntary,” she added.79 That the endeavor of an atavistic modernization effort in education in itself had potential doctrinaire implications, as the regularized marching of school children in photographs showed as well, did not occur to Schütte-Lihotzky at the time. She only recognized the concept of mass ornament fully, which Siegfried Kracauer had already articulated in 1927, when she witnessed the rise of Fascism in Europe three years thereafter. As a parting gift, her cultural liaison and translator during the trip, who possibly sensed her sobered attitude, asked her not to write anything negative about the roc abroad.

• 80 Taut’s rhetoric that I described above is evident in this quote as well. Taut’s impression of the (...)

24Taut, who saw the “Schüttes” again when they returned via Japan, remarked in his diary “they are very disappointed, old China is merely a museum (even Beijing, despite its large dimensions).”80 He noted that Schütte-Lihotzky’s impression was of a state that lacked sufficient financial resources and private initiatives. In a letter to her sister, Adele Hanakam, Schütte-Lihotzky confirmed Taut’s impression of the trip, noting that people in China were not willing to take private risks in design and construction.

• 81 Wang Shih-chieh, The Diary of Dr. Wang Shih-chieh [王世杰日记], edited by Lin Meili, Taipei: Institute (...)
• 82 Ibid., p. 15-16.

25The minister of education, Wang, conceived the dire financial situation and the resulting problems for the educational system similarly. In his own diary, Wang wrote in 1935, “last year, the total investments in educational facilities were far below my expectations; neither the central government nor local authorities could increase much the budget for education, so it was difficult for any plan to be fully implemented.”81 He admitted that there was a vast discrepancy between higher education and primary education as funds could not be raised to fulfill the promised reforms. “It remains very hard for me to draw up the education budget for the next year; particularly, since each institute of higher education is asking for a strong increase,” he wrote.82

• 83 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “1934 von Moskau nach Japan und China und 22 Jahre später das zweite m (...)
• 84 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Von Moskau nach Japan und China und 22 Jahre später das zweite mal,” (...)

28Due to the uneven funding for education and the outbreak of war, the kmt’s overall modernization program faltered in the late 1930s, and Schütte-Lihotzky’s recommendations to Wang, as well as the minister’s own plans, remained unrealized.83 On July 7, 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident prompted the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War in Asia; in 1945, the Chinese Civil War begun and lasted until 1949. When Schütte-Lihotzky visited China again in 1956, the roc’s politicians had been driven out of mainland China and had reconstituted themselves in Taiwan, and the country had been dramatically changed through the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (prc). Nevertheless, her observations from 1934 continued to inform her reflections on China in 1956, as her lecture that year, “1934 from Moscow to Japan and China and 22 Years Later the Second Time in China,” would show.84 The eventual book manuscript, Millionenstädte Chinas, which she considered a professional manual for architects in Europe, once again, was not free from the violence of creating learnable formal taxonomies of architecture either. In it, her former focus on children’s institutions, standardization, culture, and regionalism shifted to housing, preservations debates, and urbanization in an even more rapidly modernizing China.

• 85 See, for example, “Exhibition of the History of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship wi (...)
• 86 For all Chinese who stayed in mainland China after 1949, we follow the pinyin system to transliter (...)
• 87 Recent literature on Zhou Enlai’s approaches to diplomacy has even suggested that for a brief peri (...)
• 88 With special organizations for China’s “friendship” with India and Burma, China’s goal to gain inf (...)

29Schütte-Lihotzky’s second visit to China in 1956 was part of a vast cultural and diplomatic undertaking spearheaded by the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (cpacrfc, 中国人民对外友好协会).85 The cpacrfc was founded under the patronage of Premier Zhou Enlai [周恩来] with the goal to bring thousands of politicians, humanists, scientists, and artists to visit China.86 Inaugurated in April of 1954, only a month after the Geneva Conference in Switzerland and just before Zhou’s participation in the Asian African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the cpacrfc reinforced the Premier’s role as a skilled diplomat on the world stage.87 It boosted China’s role in global diplomacy, allowing it to draw upon the potentials of soft power—like the United States—to foster cultural exchange and international friendships. In an increasingly fraught Cold War context, the cpacrfc strengthened China’s relations with certain Western countries and supported its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement (nam).88

• 89 Anonymous, “庆祝‘五一’国际劳动节 周总理举行酒会招待外宾” [In Celebration of May 1, International Workers’ Day, Prime M (...)
• 90 Anonymous, In Celebration of May 1, op. cit. (note 89).
• 91 Anonymous, “国际民主妇联理事会北京会议闭幕 号召全世界妇女在保卫和平和保卫妇女权利的斗争中加强团结和合作” [The Beijing Conference of Women’s Int (...)

30At the national level, the cpacrfc was tasked with inviting cultural and political delegations from all over the world and entertaining them in the prc, particularly during and in anticipation of the holiday festivities of May 1 (International Workers’ Day) and October 1 (National Day of the People’s Republic of China).89 The cpacrfc maintained local chapters in all large cities and upheld networks of representatives in rural areas, which welcomed visitors and lobbied for distinct national and geopolitical issues. In the days leading up to the May 1 celebrations in 1956, for example, over 1,000 people from more than 50 countries participated, although not necessarily all were invited solely by the cpacrfc.90 The All-China Democratic Women’s Federation (acdwf), one of the ten organizations represented in the cpacrfc, held a meeting in Beijing that was attended by 183 guests from 48 countries.91 Its aim was to place the advancement of women in China and globally at the forefront of diplomacy. As president of the bdfö, Schütte-Lihotzky was a special guest of both the acdwf and the cpacrfc.

• 92 The group included a zoologist, Wilhelm Marinelli, a professor at the University of Vienna, and hi (...)
• 93 The group departed in Vienna on September 4 with a stop in Moscow, and arrived in Vienna on Octobe (...)
• 94 For the communication between Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wang Yi (Yee), the designated female (...)

31The Austrian delegation that travelled to the prc in the fall of 1956 consisted of eight people—all relatively prominent scientists, humanists, and artists.92 With the exception of Schütte-Lihotzky, all were men who held tenure at universities and museums. Together they stayed at least three weeks, but Schütte-Lihotzky remained longer than most, from September 8 to October 14—more than six weeks.93 The official end of the multi-week trip was marked by the invitation of all travelers to present lectures on their respective concentrations and fields of expertise.94

• 95 Christine Zwingl, Werkverzeichnis, Unpublished, accessible only at Vienna (Austria), University of (...)
• 96 Letter from Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to Victoria Maier, December 30, 1956, p. 2. Private archive (...)
• 97 Please see my forthcoming book on Schütte-Lihotzky’s participation in the Communist resistance for (...)
• 98 The architect Victoria Ines Maier Mayer went by different names in the 1930s and the 1950s respect (...)

32At the time of the visit, Schütte-Lihotzky had just finished two relatively prominent architectural commissions in Vienna, a municipal kindergarten and the redesign and extension of the Globus Haus with Wilhelm Schütte, the Communist Party of Austria’s official editorial office and publishing house (fig. 14).95 After the early 1950s, such design opportunities became increasingly rare for Schütte-Lihotzky; to obtain architectural commissions became a question of “basic existence.”96 As the marriage with Schütte faltered in 1952, so too did their architectural partnership, slowly. The long separation during World War II and the trauma she experienced in internment had left their marks on the marriage.97 In a letter to her former fellow resistance fighter, the architect Victoria Maier, who now lived in Santiago de Chile, Schütte-Lihotzky confided in 1956,98

• 100 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisebericht, Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of Appli (...)

33The visit to the prc, a few months before she turned 60, was a welcome distraction, and more importantly, an activity closely aligned with the political objectives of the Communist Party of Austria and the Communist Party of China (cpc). From the outset, the Communist Party of Austria and cpacrfc anticipated forming a Chinese-Austrian Society, whose members would publish and exhibit work about China in their respective fields.100 Schütte-Lihotzky served as the instrumental liaison between the two political organizations, acting both as political organizer and architect.

• 101 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisetagebuch über Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of (...)
• 102 Hans Schmidt was one of Schütte-Lihotzky’s closest friends in the May Brigade, with whom she was a (...)

34Although the delegation traveled by plane to the prc in 1956, their journey was long and a forty-eight hour stop in Moscow instilled Schütte-Lihotzky with melancholy. “Now, when I am so suddenly flying over Soviet land, it feels as if somehow, after 19 years, I am coming home. On August 12, 1937, I left the Soviet Union in Odessa, and today, after more than 19 years, I enter the Soviet Union again for the first time,” she wrote in her travel diary.101 She then recalled the beginning of her friends’ routes to emigration and how in 1937 her colleague, Hans Schmidt, attempted to look with optimism toward the uncertain future that awaited them:102

• 104 Ibid.

35Once in Moscow, a city with which she was intimately familiar, she was gratified to be needed as a translator for fellow travelers. The group was greeted by the first cpacrfc official, who led the group to the airport and onto the next plane. After a series of flights with almost a dozen stops—Budapest, Lviv, Kiev, Moscow, and then Kazan, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and the Gobi Desert—the group arrived in Beijing on September 8, 1956.104 Normally afraid of flying, Schütte-Lihotzky was ecstatic about the exceptionality of the landscape, while describing the local population she spotted on the desert airfield in the same foreignizing terms as she had portrayed the Kyrgyz laborers in Magnitogorsk in 1934:

• 106 Donna Mehos and Suzanne Moon, “The Uses of Portability: Circulating Experts in the Technopolitics (...)

This distant and privileged view, a view from above in Donna Haraway’s sense, initially defined Schütte-Lihotzky’s perspective on China as well. Yet, in the following weeks, this world view was complicated by the efforts to build relationships with China as well as the Austrian delegation’s participation in positive messaging about the People’s Republic abroad. Schütte-Lihotzky was adamant, furthermore, about questioning and critically examining China’s semi-colonial subjugation by foreign powers, a lens shaped by communist rhetoric. On the other hand, with the goal to produce a text intended for “professional audiences” in Europe, Schütte-Lihotzky functioned not unlike a “circulating expert”—a term coined by science and technology studies scholars Suzanne Moon and Donna Mehos to denote the widespread deployment of universalizing technopolitical strategies in the decolonizing postwar world.106

• 107 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisebericht, Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of Appli (...)
• 108 The group arrived in Beijing on September 8 and was officially welcomed by the cpacrfc on Septembe (...)
• 109 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag, Zeitschrift Tagebuch (given 14.1.1957),” Vienna (Austria), U (...)

36The five-week trip in 1956 was no less an official affair than the one in 1934. Photographs and journal notes, which all visitors were asked to keep in preparation for lectures to be held in Austria upon return, exposed its overtly political nature. Upon arrival the group was received by Beijing’s cpacrfc organization and assigned an official liaison, Mrs. Lee, as well as three other translators (fig. 15).107 At each consequent stop, from Beijing to Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and back, the group was welcomed by local cpacrfc organizations and put in touch with additional hosts to show visitors around according to their specific field of expertise.108 Overall, prearranged cultural programming was of such a dizzying intensity—with multiple activities running in parallel each day—that sightseeing tours were scheduled for the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. Visiting cultural institutions, construction sites, and large infrastructural developments, including dams, bridges, and coal and petroleum plants, the Austrian delegation was presented with a plethora of architecture and urban strategies spun in a narrative of communist progress. Schütte-Lihotzky summarized the trips as a slew of quickly altering stimulations: “Architecture and urbanism, buildings, parks, fine arts, academies, exhibitions, museums, visits to scientific institutes, zoological gardens, […], a factory, a village, pioneer houses, Institute for Natural Resources, Institute of National Minorities, etc., etc. In the evening: opera, films, variety shows, performers, national dances, marionette theatre etc.”109

• 110 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisetagebuch über Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of (...)
• 111 Over the last years there have been a number of crucial exhibitions and publications that have hig (...)
• 112 For literature on Léon Hoa see, for example, Luo Zhi, An Alternative Path Architect Léon Hoa and h (...)
• 113 Shen Bo’s original name was Zhang Yuling [张豫苓]. After joining the CPC, he used the name of Shen Bo (...)
• 114 Qiran Shang and I were unable to locate records for the female architects Chang Ching Tschan and C (...)

38Aside from the trips with the Austrian cultural group, indeed, the schedule organized for Schütte-Lihotzky targeted three of her main interests specifically: architecture, politics, and women’s rights. In anticipation of the trip, Schütte-Lihotzky had been provided with a document enumerating prominent Chinese architects and urbanists as well as their respective addresses.110 The document clarified the contacts’ educational backgrounds—where they had studied, and in which language to converse (French, English, and German). While the document was meant as a practical outline of the visit, the list also exemplified the international outreach China’s influential cultural actors enjoyed at least since the turn of the century.111 In Beijing, Chinese French architect Léon Hoa [华揽洪], a prominent designer who had trained with Le Corbusier, for example, received Schütte-Lihotzky, and in the following days, she toured Léon’s recently completed modern Children’s Hospital in Beijing (fig. 16).112 Her meetings with other municipal planners further introduced her to the development of new housing projects, educational facilities, and health care institutions. Through extended discussions with the deputy director of the Institute of Architectural Design of Beijing’s City Planning and Administration Bureau [北京市规划管理局设计院], Shen Bo [沈勃], Schütte-Lihotzky was familiarized with ongoing urban planning debates in Beijing, notably questions of the city’s rapid expansion, the appeal for preservation, and the increasing need for housing.113 Two female architects responsible for city planning and educational institutions also showed Schütte-Lihotzky their work (fig. 17).114

• 115 We have inferred this by cross-referencing Schüte-Lihotzky’s annotations and descriptions of the A (...)
• 116 For literature on Cai Chang see, for example, Helen Rappaport, “Cai Chang,” Encyclopedia of Women (...)
• 117 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag (Frauen), Volksbildungshaus (given 10.12.1956),” Vienna (Aust (...)
• 118 Cai Chang, “How to Develop Women’s Organizations in the Bases of the Resistance against Japanese A (...)

39In her function as president of the bdfö, Schütte-Lihotzky met with Cai Chang [蔡畅], the president of the acdwf, and Zhang Yun [章蕴], the organization’s General Secretary (fig. 18).115 Conversations with these politicians introduced her to the historical struggles and attainments of women in the prc—a theme she would take up in lectures in Vienna upon her return. A women’s rights advocate from an early age, Cai herself had fought for the abolishment of arranged marriage, which was written into a landmark law in 1930.116 By 1956, Cai was one of China’s prominent cultural leaders, heading an organization that—according to the statistics provided to Schütte-Lihotzky—had 140 million members, seven million active organizers, and 125 representatives, forty from China’s ethnic minorities.117 “The All-China Democratic Women’s Federation or the Women’s National Salvation Federation should be the mass organization that unites women from all classes and advocates for the benefits of women from all classes,” Cai had written already in 1942.118 She further outlined the program:

• 119 For concise histories in women’s studies focusing on China, see, for example, Gail Hershatter, Emi (...)
• 120 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag (Frauen), Volksbildungshaus (given 10.12.1956),” Vienna (Aust (...)

40Women’s studies scholars focusing on China, such as Gail Hershatter, Tao Jie, Zheng Bijun, and Shirley Mow, have shown that Mao Zedong’s [毛泽东] own statement that “women hold up half the sky” was indeed fraught, even in the early prc, with complex questions about class, ethnicity, and stark differences between women’s labor and social status in cities and in the country.119 In fact, some of these questions would come markedly to the fore during the visits with women’s organizations throughout the country which the cpacrfc helped organize. While visit to a “pioneer house” in Shanghai, for example, under the patronage of another prominent women’s rights advocate, Soong Ching-ling [宋庆龄], left Schütte-Lihotzky’s deeply impressed with how much had been realized for women and young mothers throughout the prc, other trips were more sobering.120

• 121 Ibid., p. 3.
• 122 Ibid.
• 123 Ibid.
• 124 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag, Zeitschrift Tagebuch (Ehrbarsaal),” Vienna (Austria), Univer (...)
• 125 Ibid.

41A perplexing experience, for example, was the excursion to an agricultural collective, where she learned that many women had turned to self-help, spearheading efforts to create health clinics in rural areas. Overall, she found herself supportive with the women’s spirit of self-help.121 Yet she acknowledged that even if the infant mortality rate had been lowered from 11.7 percent to 4.4 percent between 1950 and 1956, it was still “very high.”122 Schütte-Lihotzky also considered hopeful a ‘small teachers’ campaign,” an effort to organize adult literacy by enlisting young children to instruct their parents.123 Even an inspection in a textile factory in Shanghai with 4,500 workers—64 percent of them women—was cause for excitement: “Belonged formerly to the Japanese,” she wrote, “today nationalized, [this] explains the 6% dividend.” She continued: “70,000 spindles, almost 200 looms―working in three shifts for export to England, Japan, India, Indonesia. Yarns and cloths.” This emphasis on the self-determined relationships with England, Japan, India, and Indonesia indicates Schütte-Lihotzky’s knowledge of the semi-colonial and colonial histories that had characterized modernization debates in the prc. But the limits to the cpc’s willingness to improve the conditions of the working poor should have been clear during that visit to a factory of 4,500 people. “Social Institutions: Since 1951, 500 apartments have been built, a nursery for 400 children / three shifts. Evening schools for illiterate workers,” she wrote.124 As an architect, who had been accustomed to thinking in economies of scale, she must have known that 500 apartments for 4,500 workers were not nearly enough.125

• 126 In a note in her lecture, she suggested that Ernesto Rogers was also in attendance. Margarete Schü (...)

42What doubtlessly made the biggest impression on the entire delegation of Austrians in that fall of 1956 were the political spectacles surrounding the visit, culminating in the parades of October 1, following a private but vast reception with Zhou Enlai. The reception took place on the eve of the national festivities on September 30. Cultural delegations from all over the world had come to Beijing for this event. A large group of fifty people accompanied Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia. Tanka Prasad Acharya [टंक प्रसाद आचार्य], the prime minister of Nepal, was in attendance as well. During the reception, Schütte-Lihotzky met a colleague, the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who had come to Beijing with another cultural delegation from Europe, a group from Milan.126 Rogers’s presence at the reception demonstrated how actively and carefully the cpacrfc had selected cultural delegation members, since Rogers, too, had been a resistance fighter and maintained close affiliations with the Partito Comunista Italiano.

• 127 See note 115. Since Schütte-Lihotzky is using German transliteration of Chinese names we have reta (...)

43Branding Zhou himself as a unique, compassionate leader, Schütte-Lihotzky described the reception somewhat naively: “Tschu En Lai gave a short speech! From it only one sentence: ‘We sincerely ask our friends from different countries to give us suggestions for the improvement of our work, and to criticize us where necessary, so that with us any inclination to the chauvinism and complacency of a big nation will end!’ What foreign minister speaks in such modest words?”127 What made the greatest impression on her was not the ceremony, but Zhou’s geopolitical outlook.

• 128 For the construction of this colossal architecture, see my notes 158 and 159.
• 129 I refer here to three intersecting concepts of mass ornament (Kracauer), provincializing (Said), a (...)

44Before the conclusion of the trip, Schütte-Lihotzky had the opportunity to voice her own input in two lectures in Beijing. On October 1, the day after the reception, all of the national cultural delegations, totaling hundreds of people, gathered at Tiananmen Square to witness the CPC’s rallies and parades. These featured dancers, student groups, housing and construction unions, energy companies, and widespread displays of military might and state power (fig. 19). Mao Zedong, flanked by Acharya and Sukarno, greeted participants, guests, and spectators from the recently reconfigured Tiananmen―now part of a colossal east–west axis defining the new Beijing (fig. 20).128 Some members of the Austrian delegation were gripped by the hyper-militarized rallies in which they were encompassed. Schütte-Lihotzky limited her commentary to the dancers, remarking positively that a variety of “ethnic minorities” were represented. In reality, these displays, particularly of dancers, at once overemphasized the government’s acceptance of cultural and ethnic minorities and exoticized these groups, whose political representation remained contested and whose livelihoods in reality were selectively suppressed. Schütte-Lihotzky, however, felt “charmed” by the confluence of mass ornament and an interior version of provincializing women (fig. 21).129

• 130 These sources―likely assembled with the input of Griessmeier―documented the country’s historic dev (...)
• 131 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisetagebuch über Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of (...)
• 132 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vorträge über die Reise der Österreichischen Kulturstudiengruppe nach (...)
• 133 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “An die allchinesische Gesellschaft für kulturelle Beziehungen mit dem (...)

45When she returned home in the fall of 1956, Schütte-Lihotzky began to organize her notes in anticipation of a series of lectures that she would give in Austria. The foundation for many of these lectures became the only walk she ever undertook by herself while in China. During this stroll she visited the traditional siheyuan [四合院] in the hutong [胡同] area in the vicinity of the hotel. The domestic architecture she observed in the hutong area was something she made a priority in both photography and writing. The personal snapshots taken in a few short hours conveyed her impressions of architecture and urbanism in the prc more directly than any other documents. Back in Austria, in the winter of 1956–1957, Schütte-Lihotzky compiled these photographs, along with notes and a small collection of secondary sources, and in the spring of 1957 she delivered nearly twenty lectures based on them.130 At least seven of these lectures were given in workers’ clubs (Arbeiterclubs) and adult education facilities (Volksbildungsheime) in Vienna, three with bdfö women’s groups (including those in the provincial regions of Salzburg and the Tirol), and three in other institutions closely affiliated with the Communist Party of Austria.131 Between the winter of 1956 and the summer of 1957 more than 600 people in Austria saw her lectures, at least three quarters of them in social democratic or communist worker’s organizations or institutions.132 Only a few presentations were held for audiences of architects and urbanists, but prominent Austrian figures, such as Roland Rainer, attended.133

• 134 For Schütte-Lihotzky’s views on the standing of women in the People’s Republic, the reorganization (...)
• 135 The architectural historian of modern China, Edward Denison, has argued that it is appropriate to (...)
• 136 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag, Urania (given June 1957),” Vienna (Austria), University of A (...)

46Schütte-Lihotzky prefaced her lectures on China with an account of the country’s multilayered political and urban history. Most lectures contextualized the magnitude of the modernization efforts, reminding the audiences of lay people that the population of the prc was almost exactly hundred times that of Austria—approximately 660 million versus 6.9 million. The focal points of her lectures were varied, but the main themes were, not surprisingly, the standing of women in the prc, the transformations of the economy and production under the political leadership of the CPC, and the resulting implications for architecture and urbanism. These themes were entangled, as they had been throughout the trip; she discussed, for example, the reorganization of (female) labor in conjunction with the design of new factories or combatting analphabetism through school design.134 In most lectures she acknowledged how forces of colonial oppression by Western powers had influenced the development of modern China―a debate that had been framed in these terms by the cpc. She talked about how the cpc had theorized modernization and developmental debates in distinction from and against the capitalist West.135 She pointed out how far advanced China was in so many respects. Twenty-four percent of students educated at the seven existing architecture schools in the prc were female, she said, and according to one official, these schools graduated 500 students a year. The official added that this was not enough for the immense need for new housing projects and public institutions.136 It is clear that from these accounts the complicated intersections of class, gender, and ethnicity were not lost on her.

• 137 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “An die allchinesische Gesellschaft für kulturelle Beziehungen mit dem (...)
• 138 Ibid., p. 1. “Die Menschen hier, Genossen und Nichtgenossen haben heute grosses Interesse an Cina (...)
• 139 The Bureau for External Cultural Relations of Ministry of Culture was headed by Chu Tu'nan, who al (...)
• 140 For more information on Wang Yi, see Zhu Qiangdi, Women Soldiers in the New Fourth Army, Ji‘nan: P (...)

47After her return to Vienna, Schütte-Lihotzky was intent on portraying a distinctly positive image of the prc through her own work and efforts (fig. 23). In April of 1957, after she received a New Year’s greeting card, Schütte-Lihotzky wrote a letter to the cpacrfc about the thirteen lectures she had already held in Vienna. She prudently enumerated the number of attendees and which further talks were already in preparation.137 “The people here, comrades and non-comrades, have great interest in China today and they always leave the lectures enthused. They always say they could listen for hours. Even as the lecture lasts two hours,” Schütte-Lihotzky recounted to officials—“friends” in Beijing.138 A month later, Wang Yi [王仪], a female official working for the Bureau for External Cultural Relations of Ministry of Culture, who was responsible for maintaining cultural relations with countries throughout Asia and Eastern Europe, responded that she was happy about the progress.139 Schütte-Lihotzky should feel free to reach out again, if she wished to obtain more material to publicize the work of the prc abroad.140

• 141 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “An die allchinesische Gesellschaft für kulturelle Beziehungen mit dem (...)
• 142 Ibid., p. 1.
• 143 Wang Yi, “Liebe Frau Schütte,” [Letter to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky], October 10, 1957, Unpublish (...)
• 144 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Peking,” Der Aufbau, no. 2, 1958, p. 55-61.

48Their correspondence, which lasted for a few months in 1957, shaped Schütte-Lihotzky’s talks and reflections in Austria further, particularly as they pertained to debates on urbanism in the prc. Only a few days after she received the letter from Wang, Schütte-Lihotzky asked for illustrations of historic plans of Beijing as well as the new planning proposals for the city, which she wanted to help her complete an article she was writing. She instructed Wang to give these illustrations to members of another Austrian delegation traveling in China at the time. She further requested to be educated on how, officially, “architects had decided to expand the city” and how their proposals addressed “problems of traffic, housing, leisure, and the development of trade and industry.”141 An anticipated exhibition of Chinese ink wash painting, she hoped, would soon come to fruition.142 Wang sent materials in October of 1957, and in December Schütte-Lihotzky thanked her, noting that she had organized a joint event of both cultural delegations in Vienna, which would include the Austrian architect Otto Niedermoser.143 She also reported that her friend, the German architect and city planner Werner Hebebrand, was thrilled about his own visit to Beijing in the spring of 1957 with a delegation from the German Democratic Republic (gdr). The article on urban planning in Beijing was now forthcoming in Der Aufbau, Austria’s most significant postwar architectural journal.144

• 145 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Städtebau in China,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Ar (...)
• 146 Schütte-Lihotzky’s trips to China remain largely under-studied. Karin Zogmayer’s introduction to t (...)

49Published in the spring of 1958, the article, “Beijing” (“Peking”), was the basis for the eventual book manuscript, initially simply titled “Urbanism in China” (fig. 24).145 The manuscript’s overarching narrative followed the route the Austrian cultural group had traveled―cities Schütte-Lihotzky had visited both in 1934 and 1956. Yet throughout the text, Schütte-Lihotzky did not conceal her distinct preference for modernization efforts in the prc and in particular Beijing’s new architecture (half of the book and more than half of its images were dedicated to the capital). This inclination was perhaps not surprising, given the cpc had famously moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1949, which prompted wide-spread planning debates among Chinese architects. In the manuscript Schütte-Lihotzky distinctly took up both of these issues―the urbanistic debates of planners in China and her own reverence for Beijing’s architecture, particularly traditional housing―while mediating them to European audiences. Her efforts were an attempt to encourage European architects to learn from the immense undertakings in city planning underway in the prc, which she explicitly stated. “This book seeks to be only a small example of how we can learn from each other and become closer on the basis of professional, scientific, and artistic interaction,” she wrote in the eventual 1958 manuscript.146

• 147 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin, (...)
• 148 Ibid.

50The manuscript was divided into three sections that were interspersed with a rich selection of photographs (projected were ninety) as well as a few drawings Schütte-Lihotzky produced in Austria of Beijing’s siheyuan and hutong architecture; the general introduction, about “the old Chinese dwelling” and “new city planning in Beijing,” was succeeded by a chapter on Beijing, and then a section synthesizing discussions about Nanjing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. All three chapters treated questions of rapid modernization, but in her view, the city of Beijing best exemplified the “uniquely Chinese” relationship between the city of the past and that of the present. In contrast to Beijing, Nanjing was a city of education and leisure, with an intimate relationship to nature, but one that did not bear the same power of renewal and reinvention. Wuhan was praised as a contemporary economic emblem and the productive engine of the communist transformation. Shanghai, the great port city of the past, was the metropolis where the interests of “extraterritorial ‘international’” powers and capitalism had reigned supreme.147 “With the intrusion of foreigners, the city completely lost its Chinese character from an architectural perspective, and if Chinese people did go about their business here and if there were no Chinese inscriptions to see, you would not know, for vast stretches, that you were in China,” wrote Schütte-Lihotzky of Shanghai.148 She continued:

• 151 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin, o (...)
• 152 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag, Urania (given June 1957),” Vienna (Austria), University of A (...)

As an overt advocate of communism, Schütte-Lihotzky, similarly remarked in her speeches and texts written in Vienna that she could no longer find the “horrific poverty” next to “indescribable luxury,” which she had observed in Shanghai in 1934. “There is only one thing you cannot see anymore: the indescribable luxury that I saw during my first trip to China in 1934, a luxury that was hard to find in Europe at the time. And right next to it, the most terrible poverty, ragged beggars, and *****, who ran barefoot through the streets on the glowing asphalt,” she wrote, repeating her observations of 1934.151 Contrary to this statement in writing, she did, however, document the widespread assignment of day-laborers, especially on constructions sites, in her second trip to the prc and reflected on these very images in the captions for lectures (fig. 25). “Impression: Massive earth movements, everything on bamboo rods and on the shoulders [of people]. [The] issue is not lack of people,” she wrote in a note for a lecture at the Viennese adult education facility Urania.152 While in China, when she asked if prefabricated buildings were projected, one chief planner of Shanghai noted that while experiments had been made, it was economical to utilize widely abundant human labor.

• 153 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag, Urania” Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Co (...)

51This convenient omission of more critical observations may have been because she found the transformations in housing and construction particularly necessary and exciting. Each city―Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Wuhan―had experimented with different typologies, she wrote, which created a richness of responses and proposals for modern housing. While planners in Beijing were thinking seriously about inserting tall towers into its existing courtyard typology, in Wuhan architects designed new multi-story dwellings, and Shanghai offered promising new settlements with two-story houses. Chinese planners had experimented with combining concrete construction with craftsmanship and local building techniques. Schütte-Lihotzky herself was passionate about the future possibilities of working with bamboo-concrete, as well as chemically softened bamboo, which was to be used for flooring. These efforts had been shown to her in a new settlement outside Shanghai for 30,000 people (fig. 26).153

• 154 See, for example, photos 245-293, Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Collection and (...)
• 155 Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Collection and Archive, Margarete Schütte-Lihotz (...)
• 156 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Vortrag (Bauen), 9.12.1956, Volksbildungshaus Ottakring,” (given 10.1 (...)

52Aside from discussions of housing, by far the most space of what would eventually become Millionenstädte Chinas was allotted to discussing the reconciliation between past and present, ancient and modern architecture, and broader urban histories and modernization efforts.154 Indeed, by 1956, Schütte-Lihotzky was chiefly concerned with situating the development of cities in the prc in the context of the city’s living past. In writing about Beijing, Schütte-Lihotzky arrived at the thesis―if not completely made explicit―that China had always been uniquely modern, which was perhaps a flattening of complex questions about climatic, vernacular, and cultural relationships.155 But this approach to modernity could continue to be instructive, if only solved within the general economic and political framework of the prc, she argued. Two striking examples, in this regard, were her discussions of the ancient city walls of Beijing and once again the city’s domestic architecture, the siheyuan. Already during the flight to the prc, she had observed, “from the Chinese Great Wall to protect the northern borders of the country, to the perimeter walls of districts―walls around every city―of the 1,800 Chinese cities almost all have surrounding walls.”156 She continued,

• 157 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Millionenstädte Chinas: Bilder- und Reisetagebuch einer Architektin, o (...)

Tall city walls, she argued in her article, were an integral part of Beijing’s lively urbanism that connected the ancient with the contemporary city equally. Unlike in Europe, where city walls were zigzagged garrisons, in Beijing they appeared as perfectly perpendicular orientation systems that regulated and systematized the interior life of the city (a three-dimensional axis mundi of sorts).157

• 158 See, for example, Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhanxiang, 梁陈方案与北京 [Liang-Chen Scheme and Beijing], edite (...)
• 159 In addition to preserving the fundamental structure of the historic center of Beijing, the Liang-C (...)

54Indeed, the axiality of the city of Beijing at large, Schütte-Lihotzky contended, was based on the siheyuan, which had given the city its rhythm and its pace and ultimately defined its urban morphology. As Beijing modernized, it had to prudently insert high-density housing in the form of towers―that was her recommendation―so as to retain this unique fabric of the city. Buildings of only three to five stories would destroy the effect, and the long-standing relationship with nature that made Beijing entirely unique could be lost. With these suggestions, she clearly responded to the debates taking place intensely and publicly in Beijing between 1949 and 1958, famously culminating in the opposing Liang-Chen and Zhu-Zhao schemes.158 As architectural historian Yu Shuishan and others have discussed, the Liang-Chen Scheme, put forth by renowned architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Liang Sicheng [梁思成] and urban planner Chen Zhanxiang [陈占祥] advocated for retaining Beijing’s strong historic north-south axis, and essential landmarks, which had defined the city since the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing Dynasties (1644–1911).159 The Liang-Chen Scheme also proposed refraining from inserting tall and large buildings into the existing fabric of the city, and to create a second administrative center, including industry and housing, in the west. The Zhu-Zhao Scheme, by contrast, advanced by the two Beijing-based architects Zhu Zhaoxue [朱兆雪] and Zhao Dongri [赵冬日], projected underscoring a new powerful east-west axis south of the Forbidden City―as a distinct break with the dynastic past. With a series of modern government buildings reinforcing this east-west axis south of Chang’an Avenue, the Zhu-Zhao Scheme became the model preferred by Mao Zedong. It is significant that against the backdrop of these large-scale urban planning debates focusing on axiality, Schütte-Lihotzky argued that the smallness, the modularity, and the aggregation of units actually characterized Beijing’s urbanism and urbanity.

• 160 Most historians think that the First Five Year Plan is essential for understanding many activities (...)
• 161 Harvard University and Joint Center for Internal Affairs and the East Asian Research Center, “Docu (...)

57Nevertheless, in the article for Der Aufbau and her eventual book manuscript, she did not make her familiarity with the Liang-Chen and Zhu-Zhao proposals explicit―although she had clearly inquired about them in her letter to Wang. Rather, she cited a third source that had not necessarily been clearly connected to architectural-urbanistic debates. This was the “Report on the First Five Year Plan,” by Li Fuchun [李富春], the powerful deputy head of the Central Economic and Financial Commission and husband of Cai Chang.160 His report was considered the determining outline for the economic foundation of the prc, even by economists from the United States at the time.161 It articulated the pronounced anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist world view that Schütte-Lihotzky herself subscribed to, as member of the Communist Party of Austria and an intellectual subscribing to the idea of Communist Internationalism. Ironically, Li’s report was by all standards an economic, political, and ideological text that treated urban morphology nowhere directly. It did, however, condemn all the systems in China until the moment of revolution, from feudalism to foreign intervention. “The Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Chinese Communist Party falls into two stages, the New Democratic Revolution and the Socialist Revolution,” Li wrote.

• 163 Ibid.
• 164 [Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky], “Ein Architekt des Volkes,” Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (ed.), (...)

It is unclear if Schütte-Lihotzky read the full report, but she cited it as having articulated a slow path to modernization that she believed the prc was wise to adapt. In distinct passages, Li indeed highlighted gradual processes of modernization: “As Marxism-Leninism teaches, no state can ever build a socialist society at one stroke; there is a necessary time of transition from the time the proletariat overthrows the rule of reaction and the revolution is victorious, to the time the socialist society is attained.”163 Schütte-Lihotzky would later often claim that the “primary goal for the architect must be the struggle for a social structure without which his architectural ideas cannot be realized.”164 Had the question of modernization become primarily ideological and secondarily architectural?

• 165 The First Five Year Plan year was completed in 1957, the year after the visit. More importantly, i (...)
• 166 For a discussion of China and the “Great Leap Forward,” see Roderick MacFarquhar’s first volume of (...)

58Another way of reading her citation of Li’s report is that in light of her clear architectural endorsement of Liang’s nuanced proposals on modernization and preservation, which she knew had fallen out of favor, the pivot to the political party line was a safe third choice. After all, since the 1920s her architectural inclination had been toward modernization debates that were conscious of vernacular architecture, which she had found best exemplified in the domestic architecture of the siheyuan in Beijing. It is critical to note that Schütte-Lihotzky had visited the prc, in 1956, seven years after the founding of the prc and two years before the pronouncement of the “Great Leap Forward” in a time of transition.165 The introduction of the Great Leap Forward would prompt an even more forceful economic and social order, collectivization, which, in the words of the Chinese studies scholar Roderick Macfarquhar, attempted to tackle the critical problem of a “lagging agriculture which was unable to keep industry supplied and to feed the rapidly growing population.”166

• 167 See the section on Dorf (Village), Vienna (Austria), University of Applied Arts, Art Collection an (...)

59In contrast to photographs taken in 1934, the imagery Schütte-Lihotzky selected for the eventual manuscript placed the construction of new schools, hospitals, and factory nurseries in a larger institutional and economic context, framing their role in the overarching process of modernization in Communist China. While she traced the rapid production of new housing on the ground within the greater economic transformations, which were already set in motion in urban areas, she did not capture how they started to deplete the resources, human and environmental, of a vast countryside. Indeed, in one lecture she delivered in January of 1957 in Vienna, she uncritically lauded the achievements of collectivization, which she had been able to observe. She argued that the collectivization provided land for 60 percent of the country’s formerly dispossessed people and created new opportunities for the employment of women.167 Therefore, while by 1956, Schütte-Lihotzky had a more informed perspective on China, in certain ways her political views had grown more stringently communist and politically less nuanced after the trip.

• 168 Essentialization has been described as one of the key features of Orientalism, within a framework (...)

61Moreover, the book manuscript she began to compile in 1956, which emphatically highlighted China’s artistic, scientific, technological, and economic achievements, demonstrated that Schütte-Lihotzky escaped those provincializing views to a degree, although they had characterized some of her 1934 photographs.168 By placing herself in the vulnerable position of a curious person, a learner, as she had outlined, who was exploring a topic such as Chinese contemporary urbanism that was not yet widely studied in Europe, she accepted and was honest about her partial perspective. She acknowledged in the introduction to Millionenstädte Chinas,

• 170 Carla González Maier, “Antecedentes Biográficicos de Victoria Maier Mayer,” Private archives of Ca (...)
• 171 Letter from Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to Victoria Maier, December 30, 1956, p. 2. Private archive (...)

She thus insisted that China’s modernization hinged on collaboration and forms of visual and architectural translations, and from now on they would also flow from Beijing to Vienna. “I myself have just had a great experience,” she wrote to Victoria Maier, her friend and former fellow resistance fighter in Chile in 1956.170 “In the fall I was in China with a cultural group, a total of 8 people, scientists and artists. Flew by air via Moscow‒Irkutsk‒Mongolia‒Beijing on 4 IX [September]. I spent exactly 5 weeks in China, on 17 X [October]. [H]ere we were again. The strength of the impression, of both the old culture and the new achievements, the landscape and above all the people, is unforgettable. It is the big bright spot in these times so difficult and dangerously close to war. My fellow travelers were also interesting people, so that I had a very nice time free from concern. At the moment it does not look great in terms of work, even though the last few years have been very good for me.”171

• 172 Karin Zogmayer, “Vorwort der Herausgeberin,” op. cit. (note 146), p. 11-30; Marcel Bois, “‘Bis zum (...)

62It has previously been remarked that Schütte-Lihotzky believed in the transformational potentials of communist ideology, even as its limits had already become increasingly clear.172 Considering the vast enforced collectivization in the prc by 1958, one could posit the question of how somebody who resisted totalitarianism and had been forced into emigration could condone the normalization of millions of people being dehumanized elsewhere. This question is further complicated by the fact that upon returning from her 1956 trip, Schütte-Lihotzky issued a confidential report to the kpö that analyzed the degrees to which her travel companions might be suitable for further communist work.

• 173 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisebericht Chinareise 1956,” Vienna (Austria), University of Applie (...)
• 174 In the 1970s, Canadian historian Michael H. Kater was the first to fully reveal the extent to whic (...)
• 175 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisebericht Chinareise 1956 (Charakteristik Dr. Tratz Salzburg),” Vi (...)
• 176 Ibid.
• 177 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Reisebericht Chinareise 1956 (Charakteristik Dr. Tratz Salzburg),” op (...)
• 178 In Kulturkreisen ist unsere Reise allgemein bekannt und man kommt sich schon wie eine wandelnde Ch (...)
• 179 Letter by Franz S**bacher to Schütte-Lihotzky, June 15 1957, Vienna (Austria), University of Appli (...)

63In this report, which she called her “Travel Diary and Report,” she noted that upon arrival in Beijing she had been able to consult with “Chinese comrades” about the “participants, their outlooks, the distinctive interests, their position in Austria, influence etc.”173 These consultations in China were repeated approximately once a week and opinions about further work with liaisons and translators were exchanged. Schütte-Lihotzky’s willingness to put party before all else is troubling, moreover, in regard to her connection with Eduard Paul Tratz, an Austrian zoologist, who was part of the Austrian delegation. By 1956 Schütte-Lihotzky knew that Tratz had links to the National Socialist Party or nsdap during World War II.174 In her “Travel Diary and Report,” she wrote that it would be “important to deal with him further,” —she emphasized these words —because she thought it might be possible “to create clarity in his head.”175 The full extent of Tratz’s activities during World War II were then not known to Schütte-Lihotzky, yet historians since the 1970s have documented them.176 A further note in her report did, however, acknowledge that Tratz “maintained many relationships to people particularly in former circles of the nsdap, to whom we do not have access easily.”177 Although further plans were not yet well defined, the Communist Party of Austria asked Schütte-Lihotzky in 1957 to formalize the process of selecting “experts” for other Austrian delegations. She closed her 1956 report by jokingly stating that she felt like a “walking propaganda for China.”178 “Dear Comrade Schütte,” begins a letter addressed to her written by a colleague in the Communist Party of Austria, inviting her to give another lecture.179

• 180 Marcel Bois, “‘Bis zum Tod einer falschen Ideologie gefolgt,’ Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky als kommu (...)
• 181 In 1995, at ninety-eight, Schütte-Lihotzky and four other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Jörg (...)
• 182 Wolfgang Neugebauer, The Austrian Resistance, op. cit. (note 6), p. 81.

64Based on the historical evidence, it would be going too far to call Schütte-Lihotzky’s work—architectural and political—as doctrinaire, let alone Stalinist, as has recently been suggested by the German Right.180 It is true that Schütte-Lihotzky did not leave the Communist Party of Austria in 1968 during the Prague Spring or in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, when many “comrades” in Western Europe did. But I would argue that Schütte-Lihotzky’s life-long commitment to the Communist Party of Austria had as much to do with her espousal for its sets of values as it did with her personal battle against the far right, in particular the rise of neo-Nazism and the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, fpö) in the 1980s and 1990s.181 Her unwavering commitment to anti-fascism was conditioned by long histories and contingencies specific to the Communist Party of Austria and its central role in the Austrian resistance. The Communist Party of Austria had indeed been the only political party to vehemently oppose the “Anschluss” since the 1920s—a euphemistic term for the unification of Austria with Nazi Germany in 1938. Members of the Communist Party of Austria, moreover, made up two thirds of all of the resistance fighters in Austria against the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.182 This is not to qualify or minimize Schütte-Lihotzky’s commitment to communist ideology, as others have, but, quite to the contrary, to point out that from her point of view, anti-fascism corresponded with communism, which paradoxically prevented her from recognizing subjugation in China. This ideological blind spot is perplexing, when considering that one concern of Millionenstädte Chinas was deeply devoted to building solidarity with “power-different communities,” as Haraway understood it.

• 183 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Frauen – Volksbildungsheim, 10. XII. 1956,” Volksbildungsheim Ottakri (...)
• 184 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Dorf―Vortrag Ehrbarsaal, 14. I. 1957,” Lecture organized by the journ (...)
• 185 Linda Martín Alcoff, “A Place in the Rainbow,” The Future of Whiteness, New York, NY: Wiley, p. 19 (...)

65This solidarity was epitomized by Schütte-Lihotzky’s close reading of the role of women in Chinese society and the condition of working-class people overall, despite its obvious failings, as outlined above. In a lecture delivered at a local adult education facility in Vienna upon her return in December 1956, Schütte-Lihotzky discussed the position of Chinese women in the former feudal system and how they were able to now attain equality both in marriage and in the labor market.183 She closely examined the abolishment of prostitution, the role of women in public life and public office, and the creation of nurseries and children’s institutions to combat infant mortality and analphabetism, the latter a problem that disproportionately afflicted elderly women. While she celebrated the effects of collectivization based only on the group’s visit to one village outside Beijing, she also contended that in some cases “equal pay for equal work” had not been attained in the rural cooperatives.184 What is critical here is that she strategically crafted a narrative—a message to Austrian women about how they could learn from the social uplifting of Chinese women and attain these and similar goals in their own realms. This attempt to contextualize, theorize, and provide tools to organize was not a mere act of appropriation, but one of solidarity, taking action, and translation—not to join the fight benevolently on behalf of others (to paraphrase philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff), but on one’s own accord and reasoning, recognizing difference in solidarity.185

• 186 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Peking,” Der Aufbau, no.  2, 1958, p. 55-61.
• 187 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “Pechino Anticha e Nuova,” Casabella, no. 225, March 1959, p. 19-24.

67This writing was—not unexpectedly—unpopular with Austrian and German publishers in the intensifying Cold War climate. An opportunity to publish the manuscript in Germany ultimately dissipated, and from the effort of putting together the fifty-page manuscript, only two short articles were published.186 Aside from the publication in Der Aufbau, Schütte-Lihotzky published her article in one other international setting; with the help of Rogers, the former Italian resistance fighter and fellow traveler in China, she published the essay “Pechino Antica e Nuova” (Beijing, Antique and New) in Casabella.187 Despite this achievement, Schütte-Lihotzky’s position in architectural discourse by the late 1950s was one of decided marginality.

• 189 Cole Roskam’s work has been one of the pioneering works in this regard, but many more like it are (...)
• 190 As noted above the unpublished manuscript was edited for publication by Karin Zogmayer in 2007. Ka (...)

71Her writing did not, as she had hoped, become a global architectural history, and it is debatable whether it allowed for a truly feminist practice of seeing. Trapped between the violence of the “travel diary” and “the photographic ethnography of architecture,” Schütte-Lihotzky avoided the perpetuation of the distinctly universalizing viciousness of the “circulating manual” of the postwar years only by virtue of her own position of marginality. Yet it would also be too easy to dismiss her merely as “walking propaganda” as she did write out of conviction, from her own position, not out of benevolence, but in solidarity with others (fig. 32). In addition, her manuscript Millionenstädte Chinas shed as much light on her world views as it illuminated two geopolitical paradigms in the 1930s and the 1950s, in which China built strong global relationships through cultural diplomacy and soft power, relationships whose connection with architecture have yet to be fully examined by architectural historians.189 These had, perhaps, as lasting an impact on the pedagogical and urbanistic transformations within China itself as they did on reifying communist networks in the West and bolstering the Non-Aligned Movement. For Schütte-Lihotzky the building of these geopolitical relationship meant the possibility of developing her architectural ideas about children’s institutions in the 1930s into deliberations on the city from the perspective of domestic architecture and urbanism in the 1950s. As only one architect in an entire generation of artists, humanists, and scientists who traveled between Europe and China in the 1930s and the 1950s, her example—of being first an invited expert in China and then a cultural liaison promoting Chinese urbanism in Europe—may also serve as a glimpse into the politics of exchange that were never one-directional. Like most of her other writing, Schütte-Lihotzky’s Millionenstädte Chinas remained unpublished—eventually edited and distributed as a historical document, seven years after her death, in the year 2007.190 The mental exercise, to imagine a global architectural history along the lines of Communist Internationalism as Schütte-Lihotzky articulated in her manuscript—futile in its own time—might from today’s point of view not be an endeavor entirely without future.