China 1974

In the fall of 1974, Gae Aulenti took part in a trip to China, visiting Hong Kong (still a colony at the time), Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and a few smaller localities. After the years of the Cultural Revolution, China opens up to the world and the curious and tireless traveler that she is is struck by the very disciplined collective life, order and cleanliness, but also by major transformations of the territory and new infrastructures such as universities and hospitals. It is a world suspended between millennial traditions and the momentum of modernization that Mao Zedong's ideology imposed on the country. But it is still the China of bicycles, of the thousand shops and the Great Wall that we visit without the presence of the tourists. A place in some ways distant and exotic, but Aulenti takes care to grasp the beginnings of the China to come. An astonishing report which oscillates between large panoramas and details revealed by observation attentive.