A Utopian Failure

By LI LI

A Utopian Failure

By LI LI

Beijing’s last surviving high-rise commune finds itself stranded by time

(Left) FROZEN IN TIME: The nine-story Anhua Building, constructed as a model high-rise commune four decades ago, has long since outlived its glory days

In 1959, the late Beijing-born writer Shi Tiesheng, then a primary school second grader, was enthralled by his teacher’s descriptions of the idyllic life residents in a nine-story building under construction near his school would lead.

“My teacher told the class, the building would have every conceivable amenity: gas, elevators, heating and hot water. Instead of cooking their own meals people in the building would all eat in an internal canteen, where every taste would be satisfied. The complex would have clubs for people to play card games, chess and mahjong. There would be gyms for physical exercise, a cinema, a library, a clinic, shops and public baths. All the building’s residents would treat each other as members of one big family. In a word, that building was nothing less than a prototype of an ideal society,” Shi wrote in memoirs more than 40 years later.

Three almost identical nine-story buildings designed for communal living, including the one in Shi’s article, were completed at the end of the 1950s in Beijing. While the Beiguanting Building near Shi’s primary school was demolished in 2001 and the Suifujing Building is being evacuated for demolition, the Anhua Building, next to the East Second Ring Road, still stands as the sole functional “communalized building” in the city.

The Anhua Building was completed in 1960 and was intended to serve as a model urban residential building.

With a floor space of 20,000 square meters, the U-shaped Anhua Building has a nine-story main structure with two side buildings of eight stories. Originally, there were 288 apartments in it, mostly two-bedroom ones. When the complex was completed, there were so few high-rise buildings in Beijing that its top foor became an ideal spot to watch the annual National Day freworks display that took place at Tiananmen Square, more than three km away. The building also boasts the frst 24-hour-a-day lift installed in Beijing to serve a residential building.

Ahead of its time

Originally the Beijing Government announced that one “model building” would be constructed in each of the capital’s four central districts, although only three were ever built.

As a result of China’s economic diffculties between 1959 and 1961, the Anhua Building was forced to lower its interior decoration budget. For example, two lifts were installed instead of the four in the blueprints and bathtubs were not installed in all wash rooms as originally planned.

Eighty-fve-year-old Jin Cheng, an architect who participated in the design of the blue prints for the three “model buildings,” still remembers the sleepless nights when he and his colleagues fercely discussed what functions the buildings should include. “Someone suggested building a canteen to liberate wives from housework; another colleague suggested an internal nursery and still another thought a small store should appear on every foor for people to buy daily necessities,” Jin toldChina Youth Daily.

The final design incorporated most of these suggestions. One outstanding architectural feature of the Anhua Building is that none of its 288 apartments is equipped with a kitchen. A dedicated canteen occupying the whole ground foor was designed to encourage collective life. However, the canteen was never put to use and is now a bicycle garage. The ninth floor of the main structure was designed to serve as a multi-purpose hall for meetings and parties. However, it fulfilled its original function only briefy and was rented out as the site of a factory night school in 1964.

Originally, there were dedicated club facilities for residents on foors two to eight. These have now been converted into apartments.

In 1961, Yao Ruiyun moved into the building with her husband, a successful designer who had just been headhunted from Shanghai by a clothing company based in Beijing. “The shirts designed by my husband had stiff and frm collars and were favored by Russian customers,” Yao, who is in her 80s, said.

Like Yao’s husband, the frst batch of tenants of Anhua Building was mainly comprised of elite professionals. Other early tenants included doctors, primary school headmasters and procurators. “Government leaders dared not to move into the building as this would have been considered an abuse of power,” said Wang Shouheng, who worked as a plumber when the building was completed.

WEI YAO

WEI YAO

As the Anhua Building’s rent, 10 yuan for one two-bedroom apartment, was much higher than at other government-supplied housing complexes, the building did not fnd enough tenants until fve years after its completion. It was not unusual for two families to share one two-bedroom apartment since neither family could afford the rent alone.

Frozen in time

Once the capital’s best-equipped residential complex, the 41-year-old Anhua Building has long outlived the glory days.

As the building aged and skyscrapers with more spacious and better-designed accommodation sprung up across Beijing, wealthier tenants began to move out.

“These people were not high-level professionals like me but they were better at making money,” said Xu Qinmin, who has lived in the Anhua Building since 1960. He used to be the manager of a state-owned switchgear factory.

In 2002,Cala, My Dog!, a comedy that depicts the bond of a struggling Beijing man and his pet, was partly flmed in the Anhua Building. But this moment in the spotlight failed to boost the morale of the tenants. “The film was shot here simply because it was crumbling,” said Li Xiumei, who has lived in this building for decades.

Today the building’s long hallways, stuffed with discarded pieces of old furniture and garbage, are too narrow, at many points, to allow only two people to walk abreast.

A striking sign on the exterior wall says,“For safety sake, please stay away from the wall.”

“When my daughter was young, she often told her classmates proudly that she lived here; now my granddaughter is too embarrassed to invite anyone of her school friends home,” Wang said.

Today, young tenants are dying to move out as soon as they receive a pay rise. The mainly elderly residents of the now ramshackle apartment block are eagerly awaiting the announcement of a demolition and relocation plan.

An inconvenient life

The lack of an individual kitchen for each apartment has been considered a critical design faw and a major cause for complaints ever since tenants moved in.

Xu recalled that the earliest tenants used to cook their meals on coal stoves in the corridors.

“Everyone had to walk through the hallways with a hunched back to avoid being choked by smoke from stoves, like escaping during a fre,” Xu said.

Xu and his neighbors lived with the smoke and fre hazard posed by the individual stoves until 1964 when the administration of the building opened three shared kitchens on each foor, equipped with gas stoves. Under the new design, households sharing one kitchen also shared the water bill, which was charged on the only water meter, and took turns to clean up the kitchen.

The collective kitchens became unsustainable in the 1980s. Neighbors no longer trusted each other as they lost their cookware or even dishes on stoves to petty thieves. The rotating clean-up scheme was discarded. Some people even used water from the kitchen faucets to wash their clothes in order to get maximum value from their shared bills.

In 2008, the administration of the building was forced to remodel the shared kitchens and install individual faucets and water meters for each family. However, it wasn’t long before tenants began to put locks on and even dismantle their faucets so that their water wouldn’t be used unauthorized.

Moreover, the shared kitchens have never been fitted with ventilation systems, leaving the ceilings and walls orange from years of smoke. “The kitchens in the building are much filthier than one could imagine,” Xu complained.

Refusing to step onto grimy kitchen foors, young tenants prefer to cook with electric stoves in their own apartments.

“I wouldn’t call the design unrealistic. It was simply way ahead of its time,” said Jin, who considers “encouraging communal life while respecting the freedom of individual families” the building’s guiding design principle.