CITY REPORT
Shanghai Sino Deco
By Fiona Lindsay Shen

Frenetic, restive, capricious, Shanghai is unflagging in its appetite for progress. Its forms are alternately elegant, brutal or flamboyant, shaped by economic booms during the 20th century — and now the 21st — that have witnessed massive construction activity and population surges. The current growth spurt, which took off in the early 1990s, has sent the population soaring to nearly 20 million, making Shanghai among the world’s ten most populous cities. Cranes swing over swathes of gashed streetscape. Flares from welding torches compete with neon to illuminate the night. Much of Shanghai bristles with new skyscrapers. Surviving between the shiny towers and rubble strewn lots are intriguing old neighborhoods preserved merely by chance, through benign neglect. But it’s a precarious slumber.

The last time the city saw such sustained building was in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Art Deco style, expressing urban drama, worldly éclat and technological prowess, best embodied the city’s modernist aspirations. Many architecturally significant hotels, ballrooms, cinemas, department stores, apartments, villas and — ballast of a high-rolling economy — banks, were built in these decades. This heritage is now under threat from the city’s current building campaign, in which, ironically, a nod towards Art Deco forms is often used to heighten a new project’s marketability.

This is a city where walled gardens of palm trees, aloe, yucca and magnolia screen Art Deco villas, nautically styled with portholes, funnels, sleek wrap-around balconies and irreproachable cream stucco cladding. This is also a city of once-gracious apartment buildings, now festooned with laundry and bulky air conditioning units. Balconies are enclosed with blue glass, and swimming pools and roof gardens were long ago sacrificed for bedrooms. It is a city that embraces ambitious and laudable campaigns to restore its iconic architecture — but claims more than its share of mutilated icons. In the shabbiest of lanes, sensitively restored 1920s town houses coexist with painted slogans that exhort residents to abandon old homes and embrace the new. It’s all impetus to plan a visit sooner rather than later.

While Art Deco buildings can be found throughout Shanghai, the most notable are concentrated in two main areas: the former International Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117