From the Pudong observation decks, Shanghai seems an endless city of anonymous towers,  relentless development,  and little respect for historical structures or districts. I cringe when I see block-after-block of shikumen torn apart to make way for highrise apartments and office towers, though I realize most locals would gladly trade these dilapidated dwellings for ‘houses in the sky‘ in modern apartment blocks.

It’s not all bulldozers here. Successful redevelopment projects such as Xintiandi have proven that there is economic value in historic structures, so some developers are thinking twice before calling in the teams with sledgehammers. There are a number of excellent restoration/adaptive reuse projects around the city, but one of the most striking is “1933″ – a complex of restaurants, offices, and event space in a restored slaughterhouse.

Imaginatively named “1933″ after the year of its construction, the renovated structure reopened a few years ago, but remains relatively deserted unless there’s an event, making for great photo opportunities in the labyrinthine spaces of the former abattoir. Though details on it’s construction are scarce, its location in the former International Settlement and vague references to a “British master architect” assure us that the design was an occidental import.

If I remember my Sigfried Giddeon correctly, slaughterhouses in the US and Britain were largely mechanized by the 1930s, but the design here seems almost pre-industrial: like many agricultural structures, its form is inseparable from its function.

The building is composed of two parts: an inner circular tower and an outer rectangular ring. The cattle would proceed upward through the outer ring via ramps connecting the various levels, stopping in large feed halls while awaiting their fate. Upon reaching the top, they would cross the bridges to the inner core, then proceed downward (aided by gravity) while they were systematically eviscerated.

In the restoration, the feed halls and staff offices were converted to restaurants, shops and offices, while the workshop tower was left open for art exhibitions and events. Luckily, very little of the concrete structure was changed, and the soaring aerial bridges – straight from Piranesi’s Carceri - are a big draw for photographers.
For me, the aesthetic beauty of the former slaughterhouse is easily matched by the architectural innovations that streamlined the process of getting meat to market.

In slaughterhouses, ramps were purely functional elements, but if we trace their development through the architecture of the 20th century, we find that these simple inclined surfaces became increasingly theoretically-loaded.

 

Ambitious students of architecture know that Le Corbusier’s famous inclines have their origin in the slaughterhouses designed by the architect circa 1918. Ramps would appear frequently in Le Corbusier’s work, most notably in Villa Savoye (1928), where the incline is deployed in the service of the promenade  architecturale.

[Le Corbusier - Abattoir Frigorifique de Garchizy, 1918]

Le Corbusier composed the house as a sequence of spaces and views, a cinematic technique that would never fall out of fashion. By allowing an uninterrupted ascent through the villa, the architect extended the democratic space of the free plan (and free facade) into three dimensions, allowed the ground plane to extend throughout the dwelling, and anticipated by 70 years the smooth non-Euclidian spaces made accessible to architects through 3D modeling and animation software. But while most recent projects have favored open, continuous spaces for all, the Villa Savoye and the Abattoirs have clear distinctions the different modes of circulation.

In the Shanghai slaughterhouse, there were separate routes for workers and cattle. The inclined path through the outer ring was solely for livestock; workers would circulate vertically via narrow staircases scattered throughout the complex (This separation is no longer so evident as all temporary barriers have been removed, and the ramp is now the preferred circulation path for ambulant photographers). Similarly, the circulation in Corbusier’s Villa Savoye operates on two hierarchical levels – the open, visible promenade, and the enclosed vertical stairs. In 1933, these separate paths are subdivided further: each aerial bridge is a different width, to sort cattle by size.

So, the circulation diagram of the slaughterhouse is fairly complex, and to me represents a possible model for contemporary urban design and architecture.

Since arriving in China, I’ve noticed that there are a great number of private, gated communities – isolated blocks within the city characterized primarily by long blank walls pierced mid-block by guarded entry gates. While these complexes can be appealing for residents, they contribute nothing to the urban vitality of the neighborhood. If buildings can represent cultural attitudes, I’d say these structures demonstrate a desire for security, hierarchies of access, and the need for communal (as distinct from public) space.

In a way, these apartment blocks are an evolution of shikumen, the predominant housing type in Shanghai from the late 1800s until the 1960s or 70s. (A great, exhaustive thesis on shikumen housing was written by McGill graduate student Qian Guan back in 1996. Available here and well-worth a read if you have the time.)

In essence, shikumen blocks consist of a ring of commercial space surrounding a dense residential core which is organized into lanes and alleyways, connected to the main commercial streets via a small number of narrow gateways. The organization of a shikumen block establishes a hierarchy of space from public to communal to private that (almost) removes the need for security guards and checkpoints: when you pass through a gateway into an alleys it’s clear that you have crossed a threshold. The communal sinks and toilets are one clue, but the primary distinction is the geometry: the scale of the urban space indicates that you have entered a more private zone.

I hope to examine shikumen housing in more detail in a later post, but for the moment I’m content to ruminate on the fact that the geometry of an urban block can preform the same type of “sorting” operation as the cow-size bridges at 1933: architecture as control-mechanism, shape as security.

Ultimately, I think an analysis of the abattoir and of Shanghai housing blocks can be a first step towards a new urban design methodology that respects the desire for security and differentiated access, but allows for greater civic life at the boundaries. In my previous post on Hong Kong, I suggested that a multi-level “thick”/”woven” urbanism may be a valid area of research in the coming years, as architects and urbanists will be faced with a rapidly increasing population and limited land on which to build. With the simultaneous pressures of unprecedented urban density, increased fear of terrorism, and a common desire for private and communal space, the differentiated circulation paths of the abattoir may prove a fruitful area of study…….

———

More of my photos on 1933 Shanghai on Flickr.

The development’s official website: http://www.1933shanghai.com

UPDATE:

Here is a diagrammatic plan of 1933:

And here is a short post from Core77 on Temple Grandin‘s slaughterhouse designs.

UPDATE (April 4, 2013):

Many thanks to Bert de Muynck of movingcities.org for a bit more info:

Location：No.611, Liyang Road, Hongkou Distract, Shanghai
Year of Completion：1933
Architect：Balfours, UK
Master Builder：Shanghai Yuhongji Building And Construction Company
Building area: about：31,700 sqm
Structure：Reinforced concrete

http://www.johnstonworks.com/newswire/review/the-1933-building

[Plans - source (in Chinese)]

Yesterday I went back over to Pudong, and finally went up the Jin Mao tower, the second-tallest building in Shanghai after the World Financial Center next door…. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, but I’d put it high on the list of Best Buildings in Shanghai. Though it is absurdly tall, the proportions seem right: compared to its taller neighbor it seems downright elegant. While most of the guidebooks (and wikipedia) will tell you the form is based loosely on traditional Chinese pagodas, to me it has more in common with the art-deco skyscrapers of New York, a resonance that seems contextual after a day wandering past the historical concession-era architecture past The Bund.  I think this mix is what makes it a compelling work of architecture – like Shanghai itself, it’s a blend of local and international influence.

“Cloud 9″ is the bar/restaurant on the 87th floor. Free to visit, and a well-mixed cocktail will set you back less than the ticket to the tourist-clogged observation deck.

—

More photos on Flickr.

I had heard that Hong Kong was a “vertical” city, that its hilly terrain & vertiginous skyscrapers conspired to erase (or at least conceal) the horizontal extent of the metropolis; that limited land area had driven the agglomeration upward (rather than outward) and even the buses aspired to multiple stories… It’s certainly an appealing image, this bustling center of commerce reaching for the stars.

While the sheer number of high rises cannot be denied, in my experience the city is not defined by its top floors or elevator shafts, but by the first few levels above and below ground, by the complex woven circulation network that occupies this thickened ground plane and allows the city to function.

Unlike any city I’ve visited or studied, life in Hong Kong occurs on multiple levels. Pedestrian overpasses span the roads, connecting to mall entrances at the second or third floor, highways coil upward between towers before shooting off towards the hills, funicular railways and world-record escalators compete for tourists, and metro stations span multiple blocks, defining a new underground geography only tangentially related to the streets above.

Every block is a microcosm of the city, with retail, housing, offices and public spaces packed in a dense volume. Big box stores that would normally require acres of parking, dedicated loading docks, and garish, unavoidable architectural branding have carved spaces for themselves below tower complexes that contain hotels, luxury malls, noodle shops, clinics, and subway stations. I found an IKEA in my basement. Its signage competes with the Starbucks next door.

Hong Kong is a city folded in on itself. Each block connects to every other — by street-level connections, but also by underground passages, skyways, and subway stations that act like portals, transporting travelers at speeds unimaginable in the knotty, optimized inefficiency of the streets above.

Long before Hong Kong had developed to this level of complexity, architect and urbanist Otto Wagner proposed a series of urban improvements for Vienna that foreshadow the complexities of this modern metropolis. A few Secessionist subway stations were built, but it is Wagner’s elaboration of the street that I find most intriguing. Wagner proposed separating automobile and pedestrian traffic onto two levels, allowing urban life to continue more or less as it had pre-industrialization, but inserting a high-speed network for cars below. (c. 1894-1902)

These studies were carried to a logical (yet insane) conclusion by the speed-obsessed Futurists, most notably by Antonio Sant’Elia (who had studied under Wagner in Vienna), in the beautiful renderings of his Citta Nuova series of 1914. Here, highway networks, rail lines, power plants took precedence: pedestrians are nowhere to be found, possibly taking cover in the elevated walkways, or in unseen subterranean passages. Less arresting, but more humane is the work of another Wagner disciple, Josef Plecnik, who put the multi-level city into practice in his hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, creating a lovely bi-level waterfront promenade, shielding pedestrians and diners on the lower levels from automobile traffic above (1930s).

As Hong Kong continued to develop, so did architectural theory, and examples of “thick” cities can be found in the work of Le Corbusier (Carpenter Center),  Team X, Archigram, Paul Rudolph, and many others associated with the 60s and 70s Brutalist movement. Though many of these projects were conceptual proposals, and some major built projects were spectacular failures, some small successes kept the idea alive. With population growth and urban density a perennial concern, architects continued to study how “thick cities” could be planned.

["Future New York" c. 1910, from Delirious New York, credited to R. Rummel]

In Delirious New York (1978) Rem Koolhaas emphasizes the potential of the skyscraper to engender multiple programmatic potentials, existing simultaneously on a single block, through vertical stacking and access by lift. He purposefully denies any possible connection between or across blocks — or even between floors — to make an point: that the development of the elevator and the New York City gridiron have enabled new possibilities for architects, though yet unrealized. In the subsequent 30 years of architectural production, Koolhaas and OMA have explored these possibilities, and though in the book he conceives of each block as a self-contained unit, in practice, he does quite the opposite.

In his Jussieu Library proposal of 1992, Koolhaas cuts and folds the stack of floor plates, allowing distant views across and between levels, and creating a continuous space that spirals up through the stacks, (a concept that would reappear in simplified form in OMA’s Seattle Central Library), a conscious rejection of the “Manhattanism” he had identified in Delirious New York.

The Jussieu Library proposal is intriguing not only for its rejection of typical flat floor plates, but for its lack of a facade. This could be a small section of an endless urban space, a thick city connected by tilted planes and escalators.

In this project, Koolhaas seems to be channeling Paul Virilio, whose function oblique diagram contains a powerful political message: that embedded within the flat floors and vertical walls of traditional architecture are the unchallenged power structures and hierarchies of the status quo. For architecture to be truly revolutionary, these ‘structural’ elements must be rethought. The diagram suggests that the form of architecture and the built environment can encourage or discourage different types of movement, different levels of dependence or independence, and ultimately different political acts.

So, if Koolhaas’ straw-man “Manhattanism” can be subverted and (productively) destroyed, could an examination of the structure of Hong Kong inspire new forms of architecture and urban development?

The difficulty lies in Hong Kong’s complexity. New York, for all its nuances, can still be reduced to a clear, two-dimensional diagram for the purposes of architectural speculation, whereas Hong Kong requires (at least) three dimensions.

If we could take a plaster cast of Hong Kong’s subways, overpasses, and surface roads, we would have something like a 3D Nolli Map, or a Sol LeWitt sculpture, crushed during shipping, but that would still not indicate the complexities of security access, temporal shifts (such as Lan Kwai Fong, a busy street by day, pedestrian nightlife hub by night), or the rapidly changing cityscape that characterizes Hong Kong, China, and much of Asia.

Ultimately, I wonder how the study of this city could be useful for future architectural proposals, or urban-scale schemes. I’ll have to think about it. Until then…….

——

[More photos from Hong Kong, in my Flickr Set.]

[note to readers on Facebook - if the images don't show, try evanchakroff.com]