Jeju may seem an unlikely place to pioneer a new form of structural expressionism in office architecture.

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

China is a big country, and Trace Architecture Office (TAO) is leaving its mark all over it. The Beijing-based firm's portfolio includes a teahouse overlooking the Yellow Sea in northeastern Shandong province, a museum in southwestern Yunnan province near the Myanmar border, and a factory in Fujian province 140 miles from the Taiwan Strait.