Diplomatic Position: In the midst of the visual hubbub of China's third-largest city, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill creates an understated ensemble of buildings for the U.S. Consulate General.
Diplomatic Position: In the midst of the visual hubbub of China's third-largest city, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill creates an understated ensemble of buildings for the U.S. Consulate General. The U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou, China, makes only the quietest of claims within the city's noisy new business district. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), its seven low-rise buildings—offices, screening facilities, a warehouse, and a residence for Marines—dot a 7.4-acre site in the burgeoning Pearl River New Town. Zaha Hadid's opera house lies catercorner to it, and Wilkinson Eyre's supertall IFC Guangzhou and KPF's soon-to-be-supertaller CTF Guangzhou are close by.
Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting 18 former factory buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. In China’s booming Pearl River Delta, the former Honghua Printing and Dyeing Factory—long vacant and overgrown—has recently been rebranded as iD TOWN art district. Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting its 18 buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. On January 11, the exhibition Organism opened iD TOWN to the public and inaugurated its gallery space in the first renovated building in what is
For his first building since winning the Pritzker Prize, Wang Shu gives a lesson in craftsmanship and material expression through an unfolding interior landscape.
Photo courtesy China Lewis Mumford Research Center The China Lewis Mumford Research Center opened at Shanghai Normal University on October 19 with a ceremony and symposium. Amid China’s frenzied urban development, what would Mumford do? Lewis Mumford, the 20th-century urbanist and polymath whose seminal book The City in History argued for the organic growth of cities, might seem irrelevant to the contemporary study of top-down planning in China. The leaders of the newly established China Lewis Mumford Research Center think otherwise. Song Junling, who has translated Mumford’s writings into Chinese since 1982 and was instrumental in establishing the center, said
Stacking the Decks: Using muscular forms and an inventive strategy for organizing construction modules, a Seoul-based architecture firm creates an office building that swaggers with an updated neo-Brutalist attitude.
Asian Fusion: East meets West—and past meets present—at the top of a historic Shanghai building, where a rustic Italian restaurant treats diners to a seasonal menu, amidst layers of time and richly applied materials.
Enter Mercato and your first impression is its rawness. The rough concrete, weathered steel, and exposed ductwork might seem out of place in Shanghai, a city where fine-dining interiors tend to be blingy.
View of Spectacle with “Unbuilt City” by Feng Lu and Liu Yuyang (foreground), “Future of the Museum in China” by China Megacities Lab/GSAPP Columbia University, directed by Jeffrey Johnson (rear left), “Bias” by Yu Ting (rear center), and “Museum of Unknown” by Qiu Anxiong (rear right). Right as the quantity, quality, and scale of new museums in China are reaching an apex, Shanghai’s new Power Station of Art (PSA) is addressing this phenomenon with a well-timed exhibition, Spectacle: 12 Presentations of Contemporary Museum Architecture in China, which runs through July 18. The title comes from the curators’—Zhang Ming, Bu Bing,