Jiaqi Wang

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Boundless Zhang Garden

The Regeneration of West Nanjing Road District

Context

Zhang Garden, situated in the heart of Shanghai, holds a significant place in the city’s history as a well-established neighborhood and a birthplace for the modern culture of Shanghai. In this project, we explore a fresh approach to urban regeneration within this historical district. By considering different stakeholders, including existing citizens, nearby drama schools, start-up business, local artists as well as the developers, our focus lies in providing a synergetic vision that strike a balance between their needs and maximize the opportunites brought by urban regeneration and densification.

Our proposal revolves around creating a new underground layer as an extention of existing Zhang Garden above the ground, which aims to safeguard the authentic community life and traditional culture above the ground. Simultaneously, we envision the creation of vibrant, youthful spaces that serve as incubators for metropolitan culture. By intertwining these elements, we seek to revitalize Zhang Garden, preserving its heritage while igniting a dynamic and progressive atmosphere.

Breaking the Boundary between Ground and Underground

Section：Entension of the old buildings
In our proposal, the histocial buildings are expanding downward, to accommodate the producers “new culture” as new art workshops, start-up office, sharing recording studio, and other cultural space.

Renders: the Urban Valley
The surrounding New Development are gradually sunken into the new underground space without bringing in so many tourists into the existing community space overground.

Renders: Theatric and Rehearsal Space
This space is created to link local community and student from the drama school. Students use this courtyard for rehearsal and informal performance for local community.

Renders: The courtyard
The courtyard not only provides natural lighting to the underground spaces but also allows the visitors to observe the vibrant community life in this historical district above ground.

video

Underground Public + Commercial Space

The commercial ares and public spaces are arranged below, where they can see the multiple art workshops hanging over them, as a new land-mark of Shanghai. During the day and night, they can be used for different activities.

Day: For community

Night: For metropolis

Acknowledgement

The concept and design are co-authored by the whole deisgn team. The visualisations above are co-created by the team. The video is created by Jiaqi Wang based on the group model.

EPILOGUE

By the time of the completion of our graduation project, the Zhang Garden has already been empty, with all the previous community being displaced. Recently, Zhang Garden has been reopen as a high-end commercial areas, with historical buildings turning into luxury retails, which makes me reflect again on our graduation proposal: if gentrification is bound to happen, if all the community members is bound to leave, what is the sense to consider their needs and creating a vision for them? Is it simply a noun-sense rehetoric employed by “well-trained” architecture students?

I personally inteprete this peice of work as a way of resistance: despite the naive imaginations of the world, where we wish the community members could stay and live harmoniously with the new comers, despite the compromise that have to be made to the devlopers under their densification and regeneration request, this is still a way to resist. Even if such proposal is doom to be rejected in a world often driven by realistic notions, the existence of such “what if” hypothesis and such a vision is still highly precious, to show more people how a future could be like, and to persuade people from more disciplines to bring it happen.

2023/5/20