Ricerc@Sapienza

Shanghai was one of the first cities in China to fa ce the probIems reiated to the maintenance and to the guardianship of industriaI heritage. ParticuIarly interesting is the restoration of the Shanghai Municipal Council Slaughterhouse, with its specific and unusual architectural solution and evocative inside spaces. The Slaughterhouse, built in 1933, was arranged into a square with an inner circle, four perimeter buildings were linked to the centraI main buiIding through scuIpturai concrete ramps, bridges, and spiraI staircases.

This book is born from the will to undertake a joint research path on the general theme of transformation and renewal of urban contexts, deepening the case of historical Chinese and Italian cities. The research collected case studies and theoretical elaborations, focusing on the Chinese city of Shanghai and Chongqing and other Italian urban realities, filtering contents around thematic nodes such as memory, narration and reflection on new urban models.

As a mirror?
The images of contemporary Chinese cities we find on Google Earth tend to resemble each other as Michele Bonino (Bonino, 2014) observes in his paper Chinese cities and us, referring to Rayner Banham’s idea (Suzuki H., Banham R., Kobayashi K., 1985) that the most attractive feature of Eastern Asia, if viewed from Europe, is working “as a mirror” in which to look at themselves.

l libro Past Forward. Chongqing, Shanghai and other Italian Urban Stories (a cura di Shaoming Lu, Anna Irene Del Monaco, Dina Nencini, Edizioni Nuova Cultura, Roma 2017) raccoglie i risultati di un lavoro di ricerca collettivo svolto nel quadro delle attività di cooperazione e di ricerca internazionale del Dottorato in Architettura e Costruzione della Sapienza Università di Roma.

Exploring Shanghai's industrial heritage constitution means embarking on a journey through the history of one of the most exceptional cosmopolitan cities ever established. The urban system, architecture, technology reflect the meeting of many cultures and enterprising people. Some decade after the location of the foreign settlements, in the middle of 19th, the city added to the commercial vocation an important manufacturing activity. The rapid industrial rise of the late 19th laid the foundation for the golden age of Shanghai.

Alla metà degli Anni Trenta Shanghai era già la principale città industriale della Cina; le fabbriche e gli opifici occupavano il suo tessuto più periferico, fatto di canali e case operaie, e quello centrale, dove la city si era consolidata maestosamente sul Bund, il lungo fiume delle concessioni che lambisce anche la città imperiale. Nella struttura urbana attuale emerge ancora con forza la particolare configurazione policentrica della città storica, che riflette con chiarezza la struttura economica, le classi sociali e le diverse culture che l’hanno generata.

The 50th Moganshan Lu is a system of industrial buildings built from 1930 which illustrate the growth of Shangtex – a industrial textile company owned by the Shangtex Holding Corporation - and the evolution of construction technique used in industrial facilities in Shanghai.
From the mid-1980s artistic life in China changed: painters and sculptors until then employed by the State, begin to exhibit in domestics and foreign private galleries and the 50 Moganshan Lu abandoned by the textile industry, was transformed into a coordinate system of galleries and studios.