Jaguar Magazine BLOCKBUSTER – English

TRAVEL
Etienne Dalançon is gazing out of a large
window at one of the most incredible
urban views in the world: “Just look at the
lights and endless landscape. You look
down and see a city constantly evolving –
a new building, a new road-things
happen here ten times faster than
anywhere else on the planet, it’s almost too fast.” We’re on
the 87th floor of Shanghai’s Park Hyatt which, when it
opened in 2007, was the world’s highest hotel in the
world’s second tallest building, the Shanghai World Financial
Centre (SWFC). Dalançon is the hotel’s general
manager and even though he sees this view everyday, as
he says, it never fails to inspire.
Until this year, the SWFC Tower was the landmark about
which everything in the city seemed to revolve and his
hotel played its role as an exclusive meeting and entertaining
hub – the luxury calm in the middle of the storm,
popular with tourists and ‘staycationing’ locals alike:
“There was a joke running when we first opened. Although
you can see the hotel from anywhere in the city, most of
the taxi drivers didn’t know the address because the
streets were so new, so we told our guests that ‘should you
have any trouble, not to worry, just point out the building
to the taxi driver and he will drive you home’.”
But in a city of constant construction and change, no
building can hold on to a superlative for long. In 1993, the
Government made plans for three adjacent super-tall
towers in Pudong, which is the east side of the city. Photos
from the early 90s show fields and farms. Today Pudong is
China’s financial heart.
The first of these skyscrapers was completed in 1999: The
Jin Mao Tower (88 floors) with its beautiful neo-art-deco
angles. Then nine years later came the sleek SWFC (101
floors) known locally as ‘The Bottle Opener’ due to its
rectangular aperture at the top. And this year, the kingpin
is finally ready: The world’s new second tallest building,
the Shanghai Tower (121 floors), will open for business in
October. “The Government has made it happen and on
time,” points out Dalançon. “Such long-term and massive
projects are very difficult to plan and achieve. Shanghai
can be proud.” The state-owned Shanghai Tower with its
elegantly twisting form and eco-building credentials is a
reflection of that pride.
Designed by US-based Gensler architects, its lead architect
Jun Xia has talked of the tower being a vertical city and an
integrated place for work and play. It will be able to house
16,000 people daily with its mix of office, commercial and
public space – with a freely accessible sky-garden located
every 15 floors. Such inclusivity of use is a genuine
achievement when most skyscrapers limit their public
spaces, preferring instead to provide more rentable square
metres for office use.
Shanghai is a city divided by the Huangpu river: east and
west, new and old. Pudong may have the postcard highrise
skyline, but directly across the river is Puxi, with a
famous riverside promenade called the Bund that’s arguably
Asia’s finest architectural mile.
It’s a succession of 20th century buildings, many were
originally banks, that span styles from art deco to baroque
to renaissance and are now five-star hotels, restaurants,
shops and bars. The wide pedestrianised zone of the Bund
is a good-natured battleground of selfie-sticks, tourists,
wedding photographers and local families out for a stroll,
especially at dusk when Pudong’s building-sized advertising
displays begin their vespertinal duties.
Explore a few streets back from the Bund and you’ll
wander into the tightly packed old town, which contains
the true communities of the Shanghainese. British novelist,
J.G. Ballard, who was born in the city, described them
better than anyone in his autobiography, Miracles of Life:
“Inside every open doorway a small business was flourishing.
A miasma of frying fat floated into the night, radio
announcers gabbled, gongs sounded the start or end of a
work shift, sparks flew from the lathes of a machine shop,
mothers breastfed their babies as they sat patiently by
pyramids of melons, traffic horns blared, sweating young
men in singlets smoked in doorways… the ceaseless
activity of a planetary hive.”
The old town is slowly being dismantled, every six months
another block is razed, people re-homed in the expansive
suburbs – their disappearance notable on Google Map
updates. Occasionally folk are unwilling to move out of
lifelong homes, so-called ‘nail houses’, because they refuse
THE BLOCKBUSTER ISSUE j 39