Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Indigenous Reinterpretations”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

In the case of Shanghai, the second case study, the contextual reference is younger, dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century and the 1920s and 1930s, with the lilong or lane housing that became the dominant form of local housing, regardless of background or social standing of the inhabitants. In fact, by 1937, or thereabouts, some 280,000 to 300,000 dwelling units of this type had been constructed, housing well over one million of the city’s population. The term lilong simply refers to ‘neighborhood lanes’.
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The housing type was a hybrid between a southern sanheyuan or three-sided courtyard house and a western terrace or row house. The basic lilong, as a housing type, was comprised of a two-storey and sometimes higher dwelling, across a four- to five-meter frontage, built of brick and stucco finish, with a simple arrangement of rooms facing on to a small courtyard at the front and then a lane, and a lane at the back. Aggregations of dwelling units along the lanes varied according to the actual lane structure of the housing development, often referred to as a ‘fishbone’ configuration or a ‘spinal’ configuration, and so on. Entry into the lanes from the road outside, which also defined the large urban block in which the lane or lilong environments were placed, was through a gateway in the surrounding shophouse alignment along the road.
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These gateways were often highly ornamented and gave rise to references to shikumen houses. In essence, a relatively continuous and multi-storeyed alignment of shophouses encircled a block with an interior lane structure, replete with lilong. Unlike the hutong of Beijing which were relatively blank with regard to the dwellings, the lilong of Shanghai, under the lane space itself, became the site of daily as well as celebratory life. Variations in floor space, height, and width of the basic type were adjusted to meet the needs of different socio-economic groups. Specific developments also varied from a relatively small number of units up to several hundred in some cases. Moreover, the entrepreneurs involved were both Chinese and Western. It is with reference to this context that some of the housing in the Nuova Città di Pujiang by Vittorio Gregotti was designed, although in a context beside the Huangpu River in metropolitan Shanghai which was entirely rural in the early part of the twentieth century.

Developed as part of Shanghai’s One City–Nine Towns Plan of 2000, also known as the Comprehensive Plan of Shanghai Metro-Region (1999–2020), these satellite towns were to adopt various international themes in their formal outcomes. While towns like Songjiang, Anting, and Gaoqiao were built in the English, German, and Dutch styles, Pujiang was slated to be constructed in the Italian style. Located some 15 kilometers south of Lujiazui along the Huangpu River, the rectangular site was formerly an assortment of farmlands and villages, criss-crossed by a network of canals. This Italian new town was to house a population of 100,000 inhabitants, and the design brief issued by the city stipulated that the planned settlement would have to be structured around the system of waterways and to introduce hydrological control given its adjacency to the river. The master plan was won by Gregotti Associati International in 2001 in a closed international competition, and was composed of three different grids overlaid on top of each other like a tartan patch: the first was a road network that broke down the site into blocks measuring 300 meters by 300 meters; the second was a system of bicycle and pedestrian pathways, creating a hierarchy of circulatory access as distinct from the vehicular routes; and the third was a grid of canals, some of which are navigable, that provide the landscape connection back to the river, and amplify the hydrological element in the existing site conditions. To accommodate a variation of densities, the plan is further broken down into three districts, increasing in density from low to high along the north-south roadway spine. The plan is bisected laterally by a central axis where the primary public and private urban functions are to be concentrated, including plazas, a university campus, as well as sports and recreational facilities.
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The housing project of interest is located in the first sector, covering one square mile or 259 hectares of primarily low-rise residences that broke ground in 2004. Planned also by Vittorio Gregotti and his firm, this first phase was undertaken by a major domestic real estate developer, the Overseas Chinese Town Group, also known as OCT, and completed in 2007. A composition of ‘road villas’ and ‘townhouses’, the residences were grouped around loop roads that generated more intimate zones branching off from the arterial streets. Rising two- to four-storeys in height, these contemporary assemblages of cube-like structures in no way resemble the Italian towns they were intended to emulate. Instead of creating the Italian equivalent of Thames Town in Songjiang, Gregotti presented a tasteful, formal reinterpretation of Shanghai’s traditional lilong fabric. Like some of the old lilong neighborhoods, the blocks have through roads that then subdivide into smaller lane structures accessing the individual housing units. Some of the ‘road villas’ are arranged in a front-back manner, harkening back to the layouts of the hybrid row houses of the past.

In contrast to the Ju’er Hutong, which drew on the architectural language of the siheyuan, here, Gregotti makes no material or, indeed, figural references to the lilong housing. Rather, the formal qualities are further reified at the scale of each villa, with small entry courts or front yards doubling up as parking spaces just beyond the main entrance, leading to the relatively porous interiors complete with private gardens. The main rooms, such as the living and dining rooms, and bedrooms, typically on the upper floors, unfold along the largest garden, with glazed façades opening up to views of the garden; this visual connection with nature is likewise emphasized for villas or townhouses along the canals. Constructed of concrete, steel, and glass, the minimalist architecture here is clearly modern, although the overall massing and the aggregation of these units side-by-side share volumetric parallels with the lilong terraced housing of the past. Each unit is commodious, with 250 to 400 square meters of floor area above grade, and another 120 to 200 square meters in the basement, complemented by a diverse range of outdoor spaces including gardens, skywells, balconies, and terraces. With the exception of the handful of 11-storey high-rise blocks dispersed across this first phase, the overall residential density is low. In Block 6, for instance, there are 39 villas and 30 row houses, yielding around 2,300 people per square kilometer. Ultimately, this well-designed showpiece illustrates how indigenous reinterpretations can occur beyond literal emulations of the figure or figura, manifesting themselves through a reference to the form or forma, while remaining true to the times of the present or even future in its figure

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.