Photo courtesy China Lewis Mumford Research Center The China Lewis Mumford Research Center opened at Shanghai Normal University on October 19 with a ceremony and symposium. Amid China’s frenzied urban development, what would Mumford do? Lewis Mumford, the 20th-century urbanist and polymath whose seminal book The City in History argued for the organic growth of cities, might seem irrelevant to the contemporary study of top-down planning in China. The leaders of the newly established China Lewis Mumford Research Center think otherwise. Song Junling, who has translated Mumford’s writings into Chinese since 1982 and was instrumental in establishing the center, said
Stacking the Decks: Using muscular forms and an inventive strategy for organizing construction modules, a Seoul-based architecture firm creates an office building that swaggers with an updated neo-Brutalist attitude.
Asian Fusion: East meets West—and past meets present—at the top of a historic Shanghai building, where a rustic Italian restaurant treats diners to a seasonal menu, amidst layers of time and richly applied materials.
Enter Mercato and your first impression is its rawness. The rough concrete, weathered steel, and exposed ductwork might seem out of place in Shanghai, a city where fine-dining interiors tend to be blingy.
View of Spectacle with “Unbuilt City” by Feng Lu and Liu Yuyang (foreground), “Future of the Museum in China” by China Megacities Lab/GSAPP Columbia University, directed by Jeffrey Johnson (rear left), “Bias” by Yu Ting (rear center), and “Museum of Unknown” by Qiu Anxiong (rear right). Right as the quantity, quality, and scale of new museums in China are reaching an apex, Shanghai’s new Power Station of Art (PSA) is addressing this phenomenon with a well-timed exhibition, Spectacle: 12 Presentations of Contemporary Museum Architecture in China, which runs through July 18. The title comes from the curators’—Zhang Ming, Bu Bing,
Edited by Stefan Al. Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 216 pages, $25. Where All Your Stuff Comes From Open this book and you cannot help but think of Great Leap Forward, the 2001 tome generated by Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at the Harvard Design School Project on the City. Both books are university-based, research-driven, essay-enhanced, muddy-photography-filled studies of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), the manufacturing center of China. The dozen years between Great Leap's “initial overview” and this “critical evaluation” have been filled with enormous progress (or, some say, regress). In Factory Towns of South China, editor
Starter Apartments Faced with soaring prices of housing in urban China, what is a young college graduate to do? The Shanghai-based architecture firm DC Alliance provides one option in its Yinzhou Talent Apartments. The state-subsidized project in the Yinzhou district of Ningbo'a city of 5.7 million people three hours south of Shanghai'offers 1,000 rental units at a discount. It was developed by Yinzhou City Construction Investment Development Company, which is also responsible for the area's new central business district. The idea behind the apartment complex is to help university-educated people get started in Ningbo, a port city with four college
While glittering new high-rises sprout everywhere in Shanghai, gems of Western-style architecture from the early 20th century can still be found throughout the city.
Photo courtesy Princeton University Sigrid Adriaenssens, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, shows C. Susan Grimmond, King's College London, one of the exhibits in the "Resilient City" display. Are cities collections of problems that need to be solved or sites of innovation that offer opportunities? Are they best managed by top-down planning and policies or bottom-up entrepreneurialism? These themes and many more were the focus of the inaugural Princeton-Fung Global Forum, “The Future of the City,” held January 30–February 1 in Shanghai. The papers presented during the event were as diverse as its 48 speakers, a collection
This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Photo courtesy CIPEA An art museum by Steven Holl is part of the China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture (CIPEA), an ambitious complex located in Laoshan National Forest Park, across the Yangtze River from downtown Nanjing. After years of delays, the China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture (CIPEA) is mostly built, according to its owner. The ambitious complex is located in Laoshan National Forest Park, across the Yangtze River from downtown Nanjing. It was conceived in 2003 by Lu Jun, president of Sifang Cultural Group, to showcase projects by