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SHANGHAI RETAIL PROJECT MERGES OLD WITH NEW

By Susan Thorne

Shanghai Xintiandi will introduce outdoor cafe dining to China.

Saving old buildings hasn’t been a priority in fast-developing Shanghai.

This eastern Chinese coastal city of 13 million has been busy transforming itself in the last decade from an old-style, low-rise Asian city into a modern metropolis that now has more than 1,000 skyscrapers and is widely expected to overtake Hong Kong as Southeast Asia’s main financial and transport center.

The downside of all this growth has been the loss of much of Shanghai’s architectural heritage. Existing buildings are usually destroyed when new construction takes place, with little thought for historic preservation. But a new development project is showing that there is value in older structures and that they can meld successfully with the new for contemporary retail/entertainment uses.

Shanghai Xintiandi (pronounced Shin-tin-dee) is a new 300,000-square-foot, two-block complex of retail stores, restaurants and cultural attractions that includes several restored Shikumen houses — older courtyard homes with stone gates and black lacquer doors — set along narrow neighborhood alleys. These structures, with carved ornamental stonework over their doorways, were mostly built by French developers in the 1920s, and are a valuable reminder of Shanghai’s history. But their location on prime downtown land south of the Bund, Shanghai’s central business district, put them at risk of demolition as new development took off.

However, an enlightened developer and an architect committed to restoration have turned the old buildings into an asset. Shui On, a Hong Kong-based property developer and construction company that has been active in China for 15 years, was granted development rights and started planning the project in 1997.

The company wanted to realize the highest and best use of the land, said General Manager Albert Chan, but wished to avoid residential or commercial development because there was an oversupply of those categories at the time. “Instead, we wanted to plan something unique, a combination of entertainment and culture with no competition.” Shui On also looked sympathetically on the question of preserving history. Referring to the large-scale demolition of old buildings in the city, Chan said, “There was a risk that the tradition and history of Shanghai would be lost, so that 20 or 30 years down the road there would be no unique character to this place — it would look like any other city.”

Benjamin Wood, principal with Wood & Zapata, a Boston-based architectural firm specializing in adaptive reuse of old buildings, was brought on board in 1998 with a proposal to maintain the original dimensions and scale of the buildings. One earlier suggestion had been to rebuild the Shikumen houses in a larger format, since the small buildings — around 1,000 square feet each — were felt to have limited commercial potential.

There was another important player: the government. In the center of Xintiandi is a national historic shrine — the former school building where Mao held the first Congress of the Chinese Communist party; it has become a museum where visitors can go to see wax figures of Mao and other party founders in a depiction of the original 1921 meeting. City planning required Shui On to preserve some buildings around the school and limit the height of new construction near it, so this set some parameters from the start.

The renovations were a tremendous undertaking. Nearly a year was spent taking an inventory of every building on the site, to determine what could be saved and what couldn’t. Preserving everything was not feasible: Most buildings were in bad shape after 80 years. Where there was severe deterioration, the developer and architect opted to retain only those architectural features — the stone gates and the alley exterior walls — that gave the area its unique character, while rebuilding the rest. Around half of the preserved Shikumen houses were taken down and put back together brick by brick — an approach that is financially possible in China, Wood noted, because of the relatively low cost of labor.

While the exteriors are now authentic period restorations, there are new support frameworks within, and the buildings are fully equipped with modern conveniences and services such as air-conditioning and fiber-optic systems. The choice of interior refurbishment and design is left to the individual tenant.

Some buildings were demolished to make piazzas and passageways; the open, pedestrian-friendly space is a distinctive feature of Shanghai Xintiandi.

The southern half of the project, still under construction, has a multipurpose entertainment and retail complex and apartments in a contemporary architectural style, plus a central piazza and a small complement of restored buildings. Shanghai Xintiandi forms the northwest corner of a much larger redevelopment scheme that Shui On is undertaking in downtown Shanghai, to be called Taipingquiao. This huge, 72-acre project will include corporate offices, residences and a 400,000-square-foot landscaped area with a man-made lake.

A soft opening of the northern half of Shanghai Xintiandi started in January, and around 70% of those retail spaces are now occupied. Any lingering doubts about the rentability of the Shikumen houses have been dispelled by the international lineup of high-profile, high-end tenants that have come forward. Among present and future tenants (half food and beverage and half other retail) are a Kodak cinema, the Museum of Coca-Cola, Dior, a Vidal Sassoon hair styling academy and Australian custom couturier Anthony Xavier Edwards. There will be 30 food and beverage outlets, including two Starbucks and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, representing many styles of international cuisine.

The multinational mix of food service has had the interesting side result of introducing outdoor cafe-style dining to China, Chan noted; al fresco meals are virtually unknown there.

Also unusual for China is the percentage rent that Shui On collects from tenants.

Nightlife destinations, such as cafes and discos, bring the area alive after dark; a key tenant will be a French nightclub run by the owners of Paris’s famous Moulin Rouge. Wood observed that history is repeating itself, since Xintiandi is sited in the former French Quarter of Shanghai. He said the international character of the retail mix is very suitable for the city’s monied residents. “Shanghai has always considered itself the financial and cultural capital of China, and the people are very sophisticated, very international, and always dying for something foreign.”

The name “Xintiandi” means “new earth and sky,” Wood pointed out — an apt description of Shanghai’s rapid change. “In this period of massive reconstruction and development, it is important that some of the old buildings survive as a living memory for future generations,” he said.

“This is definitely a first for China — this kind of adaptive reuse,” said Chan, who stressed that the restoration was challenging. “It’s much more difficult than just building new, but we’ve created something unique.” With Shanghai Xintiandi becoming established as a smart eating and shopping destination, he said the project has demonstrated that saving older structures can be a profitable approach.

“Lots of people now realize that traditional buildings have value — as architecture, as commercial space. That is gratifying.”

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