meanings of that word. Its central location and panoramic views have made it a strategic choice for new buyers, some of whom are engaging in sensitive restoration of the once elegant interiors. Through commissions such as this, Sir Victor Sassoon helped form the Art Deco character of Shanghai.
Like Palmer and Turner, the Hungarian architect Ladislaus (László) Hudec created outstanding Art Deco hotels, apartments, banks and entertainment halls. Following a Beaux Arts training in Budapest, Hudec fought in World War I, was captured by the Russians, and sent to a POW camp in Siberia. He escaped, making his way south through China to Shanghai, like legions of refugee White Russians who would also change the cultural landscape of Shanghai. His buildings have the panache of his life story, the most dramatic of them being the Joint Savings Society Building (1934), 170 West Nanjing Rd., now the Park Hotel, an imposing brick shaft with an elegantly stepped upper tower. Dulled by decades of air pollution, the brick and tessellated tile cladding once lent a textural depth and shimmer of color only intimated today under shifting sunlight. (2008 has been designated the “Year of Hudec” in Shanghai. For more information visit
www.hudec.sh.)
The Joint Savings Society was just one of a bevy of banks; in the mid 1920s, Shanghai’s banks held assets of over three billion US dollars. Buildings for these institutions were the testing ground for a generation of Chinese architects, many of whom had studied at North American universities. Allied Architects, a prestigious firm founded by three Chinese graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, designed Chekiang First Commercial Bank (1948), 151 Hankou Rd., and, with Hungarian architect C.H. Gonda, the Bank of Communications (1948), 14 the Bund. Poy Gum Lee, a Chinese-American graduate of Pratt Institute, designed the Bank of Canton (1934), 355 Middle Jianxi Rd., and the Y.W.C.A. building (1932), 133 Yuan Ming Yuan Rd., a stylish synthesis of Western modernism and Chinese ornament.
The International Settlement was where Shanghai did business; the French Concession was where many foreigners and wealthy Chinese lived. Shaded by plane trees shipped from France, the avenues and lanes of this area are lined with villas, Art Deco apartment buildings and traditional Chinese dwellings infused with Art Deco, Classicism or Romanticism (or a mixture of all three).
The French architectural firm Léonard, Veysseyre and Kruze was especially prolific in the creation of both imposing and intimately scaled apartments. As with Hudec, their artistic expression developed from a rigorous Beaux Arts training. Residential examples of their restrained modernism, with an emphasis on the balancing
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