To Western eyes, the three long decades that stretched from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the ‘reform and opening up’ of the 1980s were rather flat in architectural terms: with all the focus on heavy industry and collectivizing, the Mao regime seemed not to pay much attention to quality in design, however eager it was to define a national style. ‘How Modern,’ a comprehensive exhibition that the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal has put together in collaboration with M+ Museum in Hong Kong, has set out to dismantle this idea. With extensive graphic material it presents a more fertile scene in which there was room for invention and aesthetic debate, and where architects, despite working anonymously within state institutions, were able to experiment with combinations of Stalinist classicism, functionalism, and vernacular references, and produce small breaths of fresh air in the oppressive atmosphere of the time.[+]