Over the past several decades, China has become an industrial superpower and hired architects like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas to bring new architectural vocabularies to its capital. But something is changing now, as China’s society undergoes a structural transformation from working to middle class; futurist Beijing has given way to a nostalgic Beijing, one that fondly recollects its own heritage. Mirroring China’s economic shift from industrial production to domestic consumption, Piero Lissoni’s new Shougang Shangri-La hotel transforms one of China’s cathedrals of socialist labor, the former Shougang Steelworks, into a monument to a consumerist society.
At its height, the Shougang Steel Works employed 60,000 workers, who all lived on-site, according to their work unit, or danwei. Like a military barracks or a college campus, China’s enormous socialist factories were a community format all their own. Shougang was founded in 1919 and grew piecemeal during much of the 20th century; the building recommissioned for use as the Shangri-La was erected in 1986. In recent years, as new supply chains and environmental regulations have moved the blast furnaces 150 miles away, to Caofeidian, in Hebei Province, Shougang has made plans to turn Shijingshan, the Beijing suburb that it calls home, into a new urban core, with the Shangri-La anchoring it. The 2022 Winter Olympics saw the debut of this vision, with Shougang’s new town hosting many of the events and its preserved blast furnaces offering a dramatic backdrop for the aerial stunts of competitors like gold medalist Eileen Gu.
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