Laszlo Hudec and The Park Hotel in Shanghai, China

THE PARK HOTEL built in 1934 was rumoured to have been Chairman Mao's favourite. It is a landmark in Shanghai and representative of pre-Communist China. For almost fifty years, the Art Deco hotel was the “tallest building in the Far East” —and for many years, the tallest outside of North America. This skyscraper, an architectural expression of modernity and capitalism, was commissioned by bourgeois Chinese businessmen. They hired the Austro-Hungarian architect, Laszlo Hudec (1893–1958), to bridge Western ideas of modernity and the needs of China. Today, in China and abroad, Hudec has become a “star architect” of the pre-Communist period.