The Simplified Complexity: The Story of Harbin Blocks and Corners

Among the major cities in North-East China, Harbin attracts the most attention from historians for its position as a frontier town connecting with Russia in the early twentieth century. Settlers and merchants from the Far East built and lived in Harbin, leaving the city with a legacy of Russian architecture. In addition to the Baroque decorations on the historic buildings, the organisation of Harbin’s blocks also presents European characteristics: continuous street corners and perimeter blocks. More intriguing is that these blocks were not all the leftovers of Russian planning in the early twentieth century. The diachronic aerial maps show that preserved and new perimeter blocks have continued to develop in the past decades, making the boundaries more explicit than before. Major roads were expanded to respect the original block boundary, and high-rises were constructed to fit into the block shape. The modern Harbin contains graphic features in urban blocks carefully preserved from its shape of historic urban morphologies. By examining the design practices of corners and their subsequent use, the research shows that the transformation of corner buildings is a continuous and progressive practice rather than a simple geometric imitation of the historic European urban form. The research also argues that the multiple historic layers in Harbin corners represent their adaptation to the changing ideologies, building codes, social values, and lifestyles.