Shanghai Transforming

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RIGI design reconstructs office space in shanghai to host an independent lab

multi-disciplinary studio RIGI design have reconstructed the interior of their office in shanghai, china, to accommodate room for a lab area.

(Photos by Jack Wen)

Nice new office by multi-disciplinary studio RIGI to accommodate room for a lab area. (designboom)

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Agence Ter Proposes 350 Hectares of Parkland Along the East Bund in Shanghai

Agence Ter has won a competition to redesign the bank of the East Bund, adjacent to Pudong in Shanghai, reconstructing 21 kilometers of waterfront...

Agence Ter has won a competition to redesign the bank of the East Bund, adjacent to Pudong in Shanghai, reconstructing 21 kilometers of waterfront along the Huangpu River. Devising programmatic elements for five sections of the riverfront, Agence Ter hopes to inject a variety of functions into what is now an underutilized area. In the words of the designers, “The project redefines the space of the bank to create a living interface between neighborhoods and the river, a new width articulating soft transport, ecology, public spaces, activities and economy.” (ArchDaily)

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Archi-Union Architects converts warehouse into ceramics studio

Archi-Union Architects has added a slatted timber extension on top of an old factory building in Shanghai to create a showroom and workspace for an artist

Archi-Union Architects has added a slatted timber extension on top of an old concrete and brick factory building in Shanghai, turning it into a showroom and workspace for a ceramic artist.

The formerly derelict building is located within the Wuwei Creative Industry Park, on the site of a former chemical-fibre factory. Archi-Union Architects, which also has its offices in the park, oversaw its transformation into the Ceramic House.

The artist requested a building with an exhibition space, a reception area for visitors, an office and a patio. The challenge was creating these spaces without losing the character of the original building. (Dezeen)

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Oriental Pearl Tower by Night

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The Man Who Changed the Face of Shanghai

Revisiting the legacy of Sir Victor Sassoon, who decades ago transformed the skyline of the Chinese city.

(Sir Victor Sassoon's Cathay Hotel, renamed the Peace Hotel, in 1958, left, and today. Credit Hsinhua News Agency | Qilai Shen for The New York Times)

Until recently, the name Sassoon — or, more exactly, Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, the third baronet of Bombay — had been all but effaced from the streets of Shanghai. The scion of a Baghdadi Jewish family, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Sassoon shifted the headquarters of a family empire built on opium and cotton from Bombay to Shanghai, initiating the real estate boom that would make it into the Paris of the Far East.

The 1929 opening of the Cathay Hotel (its name was changed to the Peace in the mid-50s), heralded as the most luxurious hostelry east of the Suez Canal, proclaimed his commitment to China. (He even made the 11th-floor penthouse, just below the hotel’s sharply pitched pyramidal roof, his downtown pied-à-terre.) Within a decade, Sassoon had utterly transformed the skyline of Shanghai, working with architects and developers to build the first true skyscrapers in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the process creating a real estate empire that would regularly see him counted among the world’s half-dozen richest men. Within two decades, the red flag of the People’s Republic was hoisted over the Cathay, which would for many years serve as a guesthouse for visiting Soviet bloc dignitaries. (New York Times)

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(The overpass featured in 2013 film “Her” is in Pudong’s Lujiazui area)

In the 2013 film “Her,” Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) walks through an overpass to work and then returns home to his love interest, the intelligent computer system he named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).

The story was set in a futuristic world that many thought was Los Angeles. Well, mostly. Yet the overpass and space-age skyscraper scenes were shot in Pudong on Shanghai’s east bank.

Now, with China poised to become the world’s largest movie market by 2020, film producers are increasingly anxious to tap into the hearts and minds of Chinese audiences by using scenes from their own backyards in production sites. (Shanghai Daily)

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The former Royal Asiatic Society building

Far from the maddening crowds on the Bund, the Rockbund Art Museum on Huqiu Lu (虎丘路) is a favored destination that singularly embodies the East meets West history, design and architecture of Shangh...

For many older Shanghainese, the RAS may not have been well-known to them given its exclusively foreign membership. Instead, they would have recalled it as the Natural History Museum (or gallery) where they would have viewed the various specimens which were eventually moved to a building along Yan’an Lu (延安路) and only in 2014 relocated again to a new museum in Jingan district (or more specifically, the former west section of the hugeSiwen Lane (斯文里) lilong).

Nevertheless, the former RAS building is now home to the Rockbund Museum, easily one of my favorite sites not just for its modern works but the general enjoyment of both architecture and art during a visit. I recalled attending its debut exhibit in 2010 by artist Cai Guo-Qiang (蔡国强), whose “Peasant Da Vincis” collection of these homemade airplanes, helicopters and submarines by farmers around China was fantastically refreshing. (Shanghai Street Stories)

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Shanghai focuses on service as city’s economy switches from factory production to profitability and consumer marketing

Shanghai’s economy has evolved from faster to more sustainable growth, thanks to the boom in the city’s retail, tourism, food and beverage, and real estate sectors

(Skyscrapers of Puxi at sunset. Photo: Imagine China)

Booming retail, tourism, food and beverage, and real estate sectors have enabled Shanghai to lead China’s broader economic transition from faster to more sustainable, better growth.

“The big trend is the transition from a B-to-B [business-to-business] to a B-to-C [business-to-consumer] economy is in its final, most challenging stages,” says Richard Brubaker, an adjunct professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai.

The service industry in Shanghai now dominates other sectors and, in the first quarter of 2016, accounted for 70 per cent of the city’s total GDP, an increase of 6.7 per cent over the previous year. This was the highest share the service industry in Shanghai has recorded yet, and is well above China’s 50.5 per cent average. (South China Morning Post)

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Shanghart Supermarket

This supermarket in Shanghai appears to be a typical Chinese convenience store, but all of the bottles are empty and all the containers are filled with nothing but air.

(Empty Jugs. Photo by Lorenz Helbling/Shanghart) 

This supermarket in Shanghai appears to be a typical Chinese convenience store, but all of the bottles are empty and all the containers are filled with nothing but air. 

Xu Zhen is a young, contemporary Chinese artist who looks to combine conceptual art with social critique. Critical of global consumerism, he created an empty supermarket that sells absolutely nothing. (Atlas Obscura)

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Shanghai Museum of Glass unveils new design wing by Coordination Asia

coordination asia has designed the two-floor 'design wing' for the shanghai museum of glass, breathing new life into a former industrial building.

As part of the Shanghai Museum of Glass and its home g+park’s fifth anniversary, Coordination Asia has designed the two-floor “design wing,” breathing new life into a former industrial building. Since opening in 2011, the series of artworks belonging to the gallery has steadily grown, which meant an additional structure was needed to display pieces from the permanent collection. 

The 2,100 square meter plot is linked to the main hall by the “golden fire bridge,” which is constructed using a a tinted glass that contains a special holographic treatment. The two buildings compliment each other like night and day – the original building contains a dark exterior whilst the new structure is open, brighter and filled with daylight. large windows and the use of mirrored walls maximizes the space, providing a large expansive interior. (designboom)

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‘Street of Eternal Happiness,’ by Rob Schmitz

A foreign correspondent up close with residents caught between old and new.

(Residential alleyway off Changle Lu in Shanghai. Photo by Reagan Louie)

“Just talk to any Chinese who lived through that time,” a middle-aged man whose father spent nearly 20 years in a labor camp for “practicing capitalism” tells the radio reporter Rob Schmitz, in “Street of Eternal Happiness,” his new book about some of the ordinary people he encounters in his Shanghai neighborhood. “We all have the same stories.”

The man means to dismiss the indignities families like his suffered during the Mao era, but what he says is also true of the past decade. Anybody who has read about the frothy excess and casual injustice of contemporary China will certainly recognize the sympathetic portraits that Schmitz paints of struggle and success along the bustling, leafy stretch of road where he lives, in the former French Concession in Shanghai. (New York Times)

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A Swarm of Rainbow Butterflies Lights Up a Shanghai Train Station

Jiayu Liu's light installation 'Magic Forest' is like stepping into the world of James Cameron's 'Avatar.'

(Images courtesy the artist)

A ring of LED lights wrap around the stations cylinder pillars of Shanghai Metro’s Hanzhong Road Station, turning them into what looks like beams of light peaking through the clouds on a gloomy day. Schools of illuminated 3D printed butterflies sail across the the station’s sweeping perimeter walls. Known for his robotic wallflowers and data visualization installations, new media artist Jiayu Liu, in conjunction with ToMaster lead designer Linjie Wang, Shanghai design studio Topos' Lin Chen, and M&W studio's Ninian MacQueen, brings the temperate ambience of wet woodlands underground to his latest project, Magic Forest. (The Creators Project)

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Shanghai skyscraper to be world's highest elevator test tower

One of the world's biggest elevator manufacturers has unveiled plans to build a 270-metre-high skyscraper in Shanghai dedicated to testing lifts

One of the world's biggest elevator manufacturers has unveiled plans to build a 270-metre-high skyscraper in Shanghai that will be dedicated to testing lifts.

Billed to become the tallest above-ground test tower ever built, the skyscraper will provide research and development facilities for Otis, the company behind the elevators in the world's highest building, the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai. (Dezeen)

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Residents versus developers

The Guangfuli neighbourhood in Shanghai is a real estate investor's dream. But hundreds of residents living in ramshackle homes are refusing to leave.

(A view of old houses surrounded by new apartment buildings in Guangfuli neighborhood, where property developers want to construct new high-rise buildings. Photo by Reuters)

In a corner of Shanghai, surrounded by a cement wall, lies one of the world's most valuable fields of debris and garbage.

The Guangfuli neighborhood is a real estate investor's dream: A plot in the middle of one of the world's most expensive and fast-rising property markets. But the reality is more like a developer's nightmare.

Hundreds of people living there have refused to budge from their ramshackle homes for nearly 16 years as the local authority has sought to clear the land for new construction. They claim those who want to develop the run-down area won't pay them the money their land is worth.

Luo Baocheng lives in Guangfuli with his family in a small three-story apartment building, which he inherited from his mother, Channel NewsAsia reported.

Luo said the property developer who wants to clear the land, Xinhu Zhongbao, won't pay the 4.2 million yuan, about A$850,000, which he says the house is worth.'They told me, I don't have a property right certificate,' he told Channel NewsAsia. 'I've lived here 32 years, does that or does that not mean it's my property?'

Developers have also reportedly offered Guangfuli residents apartments in Jiading - but it's far away from where they live at present - and they'd have to pay for them. (Daily Mail)

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Shanghai police issue 1.43 million tickets in three week traffic blitz

Shanghai is trying to civilise its roads and engender the type of driver behaviour befitting its ambitions of becoming an international city.

(According to government figures a record 1.43 million tickets have been issued in the first three weeks of the campaign. Photo by Hamish Pollitt)

For those driving in China giving way or indicating has long been optional, while traffic lights were merely a suggestion.It made for high-octane but chaotic commuting, which clogged roads and frayed tempers.

Now the Shanghai Government is attempting to civilise its roads and engender the type of driver behaviour befitting its ambitions of becoming an international city.

This has taken the form of a three-month crackdown in the lead up to the opening of Disneyland on June 16, where plenty of international attention will be focused on Shanghai.

To ensure the city provides a favorable impression 6,700 traffic cops have been mobilized, along with 4,200 regular police.On some street corners up to four officers are present. And they have been busy.

According to government figures a record 1.43 million tickets have been issued in the first three weeks of the campaign. (Financial Review)

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amey kandalgaonkar's dark deco series imagines noir-shanghai

shot during the day using ND filters, visually striking art deco structures are re-imagined as dark, foreboding scenes.

(Hamilton Building. Photo by Amey Kandalgaonkar)

Architect-turned-photographer Amey Kandalgaonkar transforms Shanghai buildings into noir-influenced stills in his latest series, ‘Dark deco’. Shot during the day using ND filters, visually striking art deco structures are highlighted against a moving sky. Final effects were tweaked in post-production, resulting in a collection of evocative shots filled with mystery and darkness. (Designboom)

Park Hotel

New Hengshan Cinema

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China's tallest building, a 127-story super skyscraper in downtown Shanghai costing US$2.28 billion to build, opened its first doors to the public Wednesday.

(More than 4,000 building workers, designers and engineers who played a part in the design and construction of Shanghai Tower had their moment in the sun yesterday with the unveiling of a Wall of Honor. Photo by Shanghai Daily)

China's tallest building, a 127-story super skyscraper in downtown Shanghai costing 14.8 billion yuan ($2.28 billion) to build, opened its first doors to the public on Wednesday.

The opening ceremony for the Shanghai Tower's basement, which will house an exhibition on skyscrapers, and a five-story annex signify the upcoming completion of a building that has taken nearly eight years to complete.

At 632 meters, it is the world's second-tallest building, after the 828-meter Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The Shanghai Tower will house offices, a hotel, museum and art gallery, and will be a venue for conferences and exhibitions. (China)