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