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April 24, 2014

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Hotel converted from army HQ honored

LYNDON Neri and Rossana Hu won a first prize in the Taiwan 2014 Far Eastern Architectural Design Award competition on Saturday for converting a 1930s Japanese army headquarters in Shanghai to the Waterhouse Boutique Hotel at the South Bund.

“The hotel offers a perfect space for travelers to experience Shanghai. The architects have persuaded the owner to maintain the old building and thus create a historical touch,” the panel said in awarding the prize worth 1 million Taiwan dollars (US$33,090).

Four of the five buildings up for the award’s Shanghai final review were renovated historical buildings. Only the Huaxin Exhibition Center on Guilin Road is a totally new construction. It won second place in the competition.

“This (mostly renovations) happened for the first time after the award expanded its review to Shanghai works in 2008,” says Tongji University Vice President Wu Jiang, one of the 10 internationally renowned judges who last week visited the five local buildings, all designed by Chinese architects.

The judges, rather than relying on presentations, paper and photos, visited the sites and talked to the architects to fully understand the works.

The five buildings were chosen from a list of 40 candidates. The four renovation projects showcased an interesting variety, including a museum transformed from a Shanghai World Expo pavilion and two offices adapted from a dilapidated factory and a parking garage, respectively.

“The development of our city saw a growing number of renovation projects, which played a large part in the applicants this year,” Wu says. “Renovation projects are usually of small scale and thus offer lesser designing fees compared with new building projects. Architects who’d love to do a renovation project are usually dedicated people, who put their hearts and souls into it and often accomplish an excellent job.”

Wu is among the panel including Michael Speaks, dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University; Japanese architect Kojima Kazuhiro; and Chinese architect Cui Kai, a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Sun Jiwei, governor of the Pudong New Area, was invited to be the special judge for the Shanghai review. Sun, a former Tongji architecture major, is well-known for encouraging talented Chinese architects during his governorship in Qingpu, Jiading and Xuhui districts.

Founded in 1999 by Taiwan-based Far Eastern Group, the architectural awards, focusing on buildings designed solely by Chinese architects, have traditionally honored Taiwan-based architects only and started to include Shanghai in 2007.

“The award highlights ‘the essence of design’ so the scale or the size of the building does not count,” Wu says. “Over the past seven years the design quality of Taiwan architects has been quite stable, but that of Chinese architects have improved dramatically.”

The 10 judges’ opinions at times differ from each other, so Shanghai Daily invited one of them, Syracuse University’s Speaks, to share his reviews of the five buildings that he visited last week.

The Waterhouse at South Bund

The first prize winner

Architect: Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu (neri & hu)

Address: No. 1-3, Maojiayuan Rd (across Zhongshan Rd S.)

Description: Waterhouse is a 4-story, 19-room boutique hotel built into an old 3-story Japanese army headquarters built in the 1930s, which fronts the Huangpu River.

Speaks’ review: This is a wonderful adaptive use project that is so idiosyncratic and so site specific that it could not have been designed anywhere else in Shanghai except in this section of the Bund; or indeed in any other city, for that matter. The architects have taken a filmic, literary or textual approach to the design of the hotel, transforming each room into a kind of character with its own personality and disposition. The architects have also scripted narrative paths that the hotel patron can follow; or they can take a non-scripted path and get lost.

The building’s greatest limitation, however, is its greatest success: It is a singular, almost personal invention that perhaps is more art than architectural project.

And it is precisely this sensibility that distinguishes this hotel from other, more commercial hotels and retail spaces. I would love to stay if I could afford to.

Huaxin Exhibition Center

The second prize winner

Architect: Zhu Xiaofeng

Address: On the greenland of Guilin Road (across Yishan Road)

Description: It is located at a greenland with six old camphor trees. The main body of this building has been elevated up to the second floor to maximize the open green space on the ground.

Speaks’ review: Scenic Architecture Office have designed a wonderful “media interface,” as they call the building, that respects nature without trivializing it or making of it an ornament. Indeed, it describes the relationship between nature and the society or the city as between 2 kinds of information of energy that interact with and feed back into each other.

The Huaxin Business Center is thus a mediating device that enables that feedback and interaction. By organizing the building around 6 existing trees — rather than chopping them down — the architects chose to interact with rather than dominate nature. On the first level the architects have used mirror glass in order to “disappear” the visual footprint of the building and thus integrate it into the landscape. This also has the effect of making the trees appear as building columns that support the visible “tree house” second floor structure. And when you look closer it seems as though the trees interface with and mingle with the structural system on the second floor and then appear to shoot out through the top floor and upward to the sky.

The center is not only a wonderful building and landscape, but also among the only projects that we saw in Shanghai or in Taipei that can truly be called innovative. Why? Because it is the only project that not only solved the client’s design brief; it also exceeded and helped to redefine that brief and in turn redefine the sales office typology. This kind of building normally only remains on site until all the units have all been sold. Typically they are cheaply made afterthoughts and not very conceptually rich; they are only meant to “represent,” or stand in for, apartments on offer. Huaxin Business Center on the other hand exceeds its typology (as an ornamental representation of the housing project) and defines the very character of the entire development.

J-Office

The most popular award by netizens

Architect: Philip F. Yuan

Address: Bldg 36-38, 1436 Jungong Rd

Description: Located in an old industrial park, the project has converted a dilapidated warehouse into a stylish architectural design studio.

Speaks’ review: The project is, of course, an office and research laboratory for Mr Yuan’s practice. But it is also an example of what architecture offices and practices of the future might look like.

The building is an adaptive reuse project that brings back to life an old warehouse and silk workshop. This is important not only for reasons of culture but also for economic and environmental sustainability. Yuan uses cheap, everyday and recycled materials from the site to materialize a design that is 21st century. Robots and 3D printers are as common in the studio as hand drawings and hand-modeled maquettes.

Indeed, J-Office is not just an office; it is a prototype itself easily mingling 21st-century, 20th- and 19th-century tools, technology and materials. And in this way it is very Shanghai: It is a seamless mixture of the global and the local where one can no longer distinguish one from the other.

TJAD New Office Building

Renovation of No. 1 Bus Station

Architect: Zeng Qun

Address: 1230 Siping Rd

Description: The project has transformed an old parking garage for No. 1 Bus Station into the grand office for Tongji University’s Architectural Design Group.

Speaks’ review: This is perhaps the most refined and successful building we visited in Shanghai. Indeed, it is such a successful adaptation and transformation of one building typology — a bus station — into another — office building — that it is hard to believe it is not an entirely new construction.

Everything — from the new, cantilevered rooftop box, to the copper, wood and acrylic materials and finishes — is designed by the hand of a highly skilled, accomplished architect. This is a very sophisticated building which hides its own complexity — including its former typological signature — in the simplicity of elegant, function spaces that flow, seamlessly, one into the other. This is one of the most successful adaptive use projects I have seen anywhere.

Power Station of Art

Architects: Zhang Ming and Zhang Zi

Address: 200 Huayuangang Rd (across Miaojiang Rd)

Description: The project has turned the Pavilion of Urban Future at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai into a leisure and exhibition space for contemporary art.

Speaks’ review: This is an incredibly ambitious project the real success of which will only be determined when it begins to attract the kind of crowds it is designed to attract, circulate and educate.

The architects have certainly done their job in transforming this massive industrial machine into an organized complex of spaces that aspire to become a total art environment.

Indeed, like many of these kinds of urban art total projects — one thinks of London and Essen (Germany) — the Power Station is not a building that displays art but is rather an industrial scale culture factory in which art pieces and the spaces they hang or are placed within are ultimately all part of the same experience.

And this, for me, is the most successful accomplishment of the architects.

They have created a total environment where architecture and art are fused and woven together by the non-scripted paths patrons follow.

The architects’ design hand is not heavy and so the spaces through which patrons move are not over-designed or over-articulated; the architect’s choice to articulate with bright colors the former industrial machines and armatures only underscore the subtle overall designed experience.




 

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