Urban Renewal of the Wai Tan Yuan Area Shanghai, 2002-2003

This project won the closed international competition 269 for the restoration and urban renewal of the area of Waitanyuan, the neighborhood of the former British Concession that marked the birth of the Bund and the monumental urban waterfront on the Huangpu River between the end of the Nineteenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth. The project involves many themes. The difficulties created by the central urban location of an area 1,937,504 square feet corresponds to the need to favor the project to renovate architectural legacy, requiring careful evaluation of the culture of historic preservation which is of growing importance in China, and in Shanghai, in particular, where this legacy is viewed as a sign of its own cosmopolitan identity. The project, in addition to identifying British and more generally European architectural value for protection and restoration, identifies the new parts and those that are to be changed, interpreting the urban scheme and organization of the buildings as elements of reference for organizing the morphology of interventions. Thanks to the different types of restoration of historic heritage, specific proposals were developed in order to integrate the existing buildings into a global image to requalify the area including a new system of public spaces enriched by new architectures.