brandon berry  艾顿

I attended to lecture by Thomas Spranger yesterday entitled “Restoration and new build within historic urban context in China.” It was a focus on the Rockbund project (2006-2014) in Shanghai by Chipperfield Architects. Although the Rockbund Museum is a focal point, the project actually covers 10 buildings, the oldest of which is from 1897. These 10 buildings span a one block area in the northern end of the bund just behind the British embassy.

Three elements of interest here:

1. Shanghai is in critical need of more effort from those who have a voice in the city to spread knowledge of protection and restoration, and both the foreigner and native Chinese perspectives have something valuable to contribute together here. The heritage and thus protection/restoration of commercial or residential architecture, and more importantly, the idea of an architectural preservation and restoration movement in China, should be universally appealing. So the point of this particular lecture, to me, was less about the foreign architect restoring foreign, “imperial-trade-era” buildings in Shanghai, and more about the effort to restore in general and the lessons in this. (fyi, Their primary funding was from Hong Kong Chinese investors with help from the Rockefeller group in NYC.) The architects had to work against many challenges to teach the Chinese general contracting team the basics of restoration methods, and it sounds like even though it was a long frustrating effort, it was worth it and in the end the Chinese GC team gained extremely valuable expertise.

2. The intersection of capitalist interests with social agenda can have positive effects. The fact that the investors chose to restore this area is clearly because the property would be more valuable than if it was destroyed and replaced with new development. This is a point of view many developers in China (foreign and local) can should be more diligent in exploring, no matter what the property.

3. I find particularly interesting the concept of companies, organizations or teams which focus on restoration architecture, and the unique expertise and point of view this topic requires. One thing I like about this point of view and the Rockbund project in particular is the notion historical layering, or the ways in which a restoration exposes or denies key moments in the life of a building. The architects here had a clear dialogue about whether to return the 10 builds building to their “original” state, or to leave remnants of the change that occurred over the past 100 years. So this meant a site evaluation of all facades and each room in detail to create a restoration strategy. In this case, they chose to not only expose their own work in certain places instead of hide it. For example, they used the same traditional process to create Shanghai Plaster but without covering the “newness” of the material finish so that a tenant or visitor can appreciate the restoration work. They also went so far as to preserve certain earlier restorations in the event that the restoration was attempting to remain true to the original design. Where restorations or extensions where different in style of material from the original design, these layers were destroyed. All-in-all, it’s a compelling and bold statement about what is “original” in architecture over a long time scale.

Footnote: The image above is from the Rockbund Museum’s opening in May 2010 from the artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s curated show Peasant Da Vincis, a collection of amazing inventions from Chinese farmers. The words on the building 不知如何降下 can have several meanings but the translation from the artist was “Never learned how to land”.

Break it down further:
char1: (bu) meanings “no” like in “bu yao”, or negatory, the n’pas in french.
char2: (zhi) meanings “to know” or “understand”
char3+4 (ru he) meaning “how to”
char5+6:(jiang xia) meaning to “drop” or “bring down” or “land” as in landing from flight.

More info: Rockbund and Rockbund Life

[Image Source: Remko Tanis, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]