Ties That Bind - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

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Ties That Bind
Gensler has designed some 60 projects in China. Fiscal 2005 China revenues totaled around $6
million. Among its signature projects, all in the Shanghai area, are a sustainable high-tech campus
design for Shanghai Pudong Development Bank; the Wangbaohe Central and Pudong Hotels;
the Soufa and Shanghai Shimao Sheshan Hotel and Conference Centers; and the 400,000-square
meter Nanjing Road West master plan to revitalize the western third of Nanjing Road as an upscale
shopping street, while creating five new districts and preserving historic sections.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has completed, designed, or has under construction some
100 projects in China, and the China market has accounted for nearly one-third of the San Francisco
office’s annual revenues since 2000. SOM’s first project in the country was the Industrial
and Commercial Bank of China headquarters building in Beijing in the early 1990s. Subsequent
projects included the Suzhou International Convention Center; the Lenovo corporate headquarters
in Zhongguancun, Beijing; the Architectural Record/Business Week award-winning Jianianhua
Center in Chongqing; and the 88-story Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai’s Pudong commercial district,
which features 50 stories of offices, a 555-room Grand Hyatt Hotel on the top floors, and a sixstory
retail/theater/conference complex podium. The Jin Mao Tower is the tallest commercial
building in China.
Left: Jin Mao Tower,
Pudong District of
Shanghai
Artist Credit:
Gartner Photography
Source: SOM
Right: Jin Mao Tower
atrium.
Artist Credit: Heinrich
Blessing Photography
Source: SOM
In the late 1990s, SOM partnered with Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo’s Shui On Group to
plan a seminal $3.5 billion redevelopment of Shanghai’s Taipingqiao district. The first phase of
this project was a $175 million preservation/modernization of the Xintiandi neighborhood,
completed in 2002. The modest brick meeting hall in which the Chinese Communist Party was
founded in 1921 was restored; the façades of other 1930s buildings were restored, and their interiors
gutted, to accommodate restaurants and shops; and a neighborhood park and lake were
constructed. The larger Taipingqiao project will be completed by 2010. Xintiandi is now a thriving
entertainment district with restaurants, theaters, and clubs. The success of the master plan—
and SOM’s insistence that historic structures be preserved—set a new model for development
and preservation in China that may help save similar districts and buildings in other areas.