Loading summary
Transcript4 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:11]
B
Fishing village and market town. The now bustling megacity of Shanghai grew to prominence in the 19th century thanks to its favorable waterside location, enabling trade both domestically and internationally. You're listening to Tall Stories, a monocle production brought to you by the team behind the Urbanist. I'm Andrew Tuck. In this episode, Thomas Pineiro takes us around the cultural district of West Bund, where a recent exhibition in West Bund Museum explores how the millennia old settlement of Shanghai has grown into China's most populous urban area.
- [00:51]
A
Architecture and urbanism under communist regimes are often framed through a narrow lens, brutalist top and ideologically uniform. But what happens when the system changes and drives the rise of modern megacities? The exhibition Building Architecture, Urbanism and culture since 1949 paints a more diverse picture. The show is curated by Xiang Ning Li, professor and assistant dean at Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and is now on view at the city's westbound museum. Each of the nine sections of the show tracks Shanghai's evolution under the People's Republic of China through architectural models and drawings paired with archival material and artworks. I stopped by recently to see how the narrative plays out on the ground on an upper gallery of the museum. The show starts with a timeline that somewhat hurriedly glances at pre revolutionary Shanghai, a city once divided into international concessions. Blueprints and photographs showcase neoclassical and Art deco buildings, the kind you might just as easily find in Birmingham, Calcutta or Melbourne. But soon enough we arrive in the 50s. The first room sets the tone with models and images that reflect the new ideological order. These are monumental buildings ranging from sports complexes to university and cultural halls. Among them is the Sino Soviet Friendship Building, a massive Stalinist style structure with a central spire topped by a gleaming red star. Although it's not a high rise, the structure looks a lot like one of the Seven Sisters in Moscow. Today it goes by the name Shanghai Exhibition center and hosts everything from art fairs to car shows. Another project that captures the spirit of the time is the transformation of the Shanghai Racecourse, a former whites only club right in the heart of the city. Reclaimed by the new government, the terrain was divided into two public spaces symbolically named People's park and Peoples Square, the latter featuring a ceremonial avenue designed for parades. Moving forward, the second gallery explores how the city responded to its growing working class population. A series of finely detailed dioramas traces the evolution of housing. They go from adaptation of European style buildings to the rise of utilitarian housing blocks and eventually to homes built for the open market. One detail inside these miniature Homes captures the shifting mindset over the decades. The Portrait of Mao Zedong. This staple item is initially displayed like a household altar, but only to gradually shrink in size and prominence before disappearing altogether from most homes. Still, these dioramas feel too sterile, and they don't quite capture just how overcrowded things really were. China practiced communal living at full volume, with entire families packed into single rooms and kitchens and bathrooms pushed into into shared spaces. By the third room, we're ready. In the 80s, witnessing the move from a planned economy to a market one, new infrastructure projects like airports, shopping malls, international hotels and office towers emerge gradually giving the city a more globalized, outward facing identity. Archival footage on display captures the newfound dynamism. Office workers stride through marble lobbies, rooftop bars and clubs come alive at night, and foreigners once again blend into the crowds. The momentum builds in the Next Room, which turns to Luzhe, the district that has come to embody China's rise. Until the mid-90s, the area was a sprawl of warehouses, factories and farmland, but then the central government decided to reimagine it as a new financial center. Dramatic photographs depict the rise of structures like the Oriental Pearl Tower, Jin Mao Tower, the World Financial center, and finally the Shanghai Tower, all coming together to compose the futuristic skyline that now defines Shanghai. The Next rooms explore projects of the new millennium, when the national ambition was to place Shanghai among global capitals like New York, London and Tokyo. One room focuses on the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, featuring a large Artwork by Drawing Architecture Studio, a Beijing firm known for its bold, playful architecture drawings. Something like Archegram, but reimagined for today. Gallery 8 is about Shanghai's waterfront renaissance. It's a fitting chapter given that the exhibition itself is housed in a riverfront museum designed by David Chipperfield and positioned along an 8 kilometer cultural corridor on the margins of the Huangpu River. The area is known simply as the West Pond. Right next door to the museum is Tank, an art center and park built in and around five decommissioned aviation fuel tanks from a former airport. Not far off, the Long Museum occupies a former coal wharf, while the Power Station of Art, a state run contemporary art museum, lives in a repurposed power plant. The newest addition to the area is Gate M, a landscaped shopping and leisure hub that transforms towering Silas into colorful climbing walls. From the galleries of the westbound museum, we can see another landmark in the making. The fan like forms of the grand Shanghai Opera House are taking shape across the river. In a way, the last room in the exhibition circles back to the heritage of pre revolutionary Shanghai. The projects on display here suggest a more sustainable path forward. They favor smaller scale interventions and a more considered reuse of historic buildings and older neighborhoods. And that's where things get complicated again. The exhibition makes no mention of the substantial losses to the city's architectural heritage after decades of unchecked development. Until the 90s, much of Shanghai was made up of li longs, dense land based communities that blended Chinese and Western elements. Today only a fraction remains, with many still disappearing in plain sight. Building Shanghai succeeds in capturing the scale and pace of transformation under the prc, tracing how ideology, commerce and the drive for reinvention have shaped and continue to shape China's largest city. However, the show could have gained depth by including the pressures of urban transformation and acknowledging that, as in many of Asia's megacities, progress has come at a cost. Then again, given where the exhibition takes place, space for critique is understandably limited.
- [08:08]
B
Tall Stories is a Monocle production from the team behind the Urbanist. This episode was written by Thomas Pinero and produced and edited by David Stevens. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and subscribe to receive new episodes every week. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers.