MID-OCCUPANCY URBANISM IN SHANGHAI
The current state of the site of Expo 2010
Introduction
The site of Expo 2010 Shanghai China is in the middle of its transition from a land of make-believe to a key new area of the city. Of the 145 buildings that made up the expo, only five were built to be permanent.1 Yet three years after the world’s fair, 99 temporary buildings remain. Some continue to promote the countries that built them. Others have been converted into theaters, museums, and theme parks. Still others stand firm but empty, awaiting reuse or demolition.
The Expo buildings could be viewed as anomalies, architectural follies that have little relevance to the more serious development of greater Shanghai. But the former Expo site could also be read as a microcosm of the city. As in other parts of Shanghai, a number of factors converge to result in the reuse of some buildings and the demolition or disuse of others. This chapter looks at the Expo site in the middle of its redevelopment to explore these factors.
Expo 2010
Expo 2010 Shanghai China took place between May 1 and October 31, 2010. The world’s fair, organized under the theme “Better City, Better Life,” covered 5.28 square kilometers formerly occupied by factories, residences, and a vast shipyard on both sides of Shanghai’s Huangpu River.2 Its more popular venues – the national pavilions and the main event spaces – were south of the Huangpu in the newly developed part of the city called Pudong. Corporate pavilions and the Urban Best Practices Area were positioned in Puxi, north of the river. Both sites are three kilometers south of Shanghai’s center, where Puxi’s Bund faces Pudong’s Lujiazui across the river.
Expo 2010 came on the heels of the hugely successful Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. While the Olympics aimed to show China to the world, Expo had the opposite intent – to show the world to China. Only 5.8 percent of the record-breaking 73 million visitors were foreigners.3 The 246 participating countries and international organizations spared no expense in this show. France exhibited original artwork by Van Gogh, Manet, and Millet; Chile displayed a capsule designed to rescue the Copiapó miners; and Denmark brought the actual Little Mermaid, a statue and national treasure, from the Copenhagen harbor to Shanghai.
FIGURE 16.1 Footprint of buildings during Expo 2010 Shanghai China. The Huangpu River runs between buildings in Puxi (to the north) and Pudong (to the south). The five buildings designated to be permanent structures are (1) Expo Axis; (2) Expo Center; (3) Expo Culture Center; (4) Theme Pavilion; and (5) China Pavilion.
Source: Clare Jacobson.
Countries showed themselves to China not only in what they brought to Expo but also in the buildings that housed these wonders. Well-known architects – including Norman Foster (United Arab Emirates Pavilion) and Miralles Tagliabue EMBT (Spain) – designed national pavilions. Designers with less global recognition – such as Vo Trong Nghia (Vietnam), John Körmeling (The Netherlands), and Juan Carlos Sabbagh (Chile) – produced sublime pieces of architecture as well. Cities and corporations were also well represented in pavilions by Wang Shu (Ningbo) and Yung Ho Chang (Shanghai Corporate).
Thomas Rohdewald, Director of the Luxembourg Pavilion, talks about his country’s participation in the fair.4 Luxembourg, he says, does not attend every world expo but decided to join Expo 2010 in order to increase its recognition in Asia. In Shanghai, Luxembourg built its largest-ever world expo pavilion, in both size and budget. Rohdewald says a combination of good architectural design, curiosity about his small country, the inclusion of Luxembourg City’s original Golden Lady statue, and a free-flowing rather than periodic entrance led to 7.2 million visitors. This is 10 percent of the total number of Shanghai Expo visitors, up from 5 percent at the 2000 Expo in Hanover, Germany. According to the Luxemburger Wort, the pavilion had another benefit: it garnered business revenue of €5.8 million ($7.8 million).5 Coincidentally or not, applications for C visas from China to the Schengen Area, of which Luxembourg is a part, increased from 597,430 in 2009 to 1,079,516 in 2011.6
FIGURE 16.2 Footprint of buildings on July 12, 2013. Buildings in black are in use; those in gray are extant but not in use. The five permanent buildings are now (1) River Mall; (2) Shanghai Expo Center; (3) Mercedes-Benz Arena; (4) ICBC World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center; and (5) China Art Museum. Other buildings and collections of buildings in use are (6) Saudi Arabia Pavilion; (7) Expo Stage (formerly Baosteel Stage); (8) Energy Park (Turkey, Ukraine, and Iceland pavilions); (9) Shanghai Italian Center (Italy and Luxembourg pavilions); (10) Shanghai Expo-Mart (Africa Joint Pavilion); (11) Chocolate Happy Land (South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Argentina, and Slovenia pavilions and an information center/toilet); (12) Gung Ho Communications Office (Cuba Pavilion); (13) information center/toilet; (14) Commemoration Exhibition of Expo 2010 Shanghai China (Pavilion of Urban Footprint); (15) PICC Pavilion; (16) Shanghai Children’s Theater (SAIC-GM Pavilion); (17) Power Station of Art (Pavilion of Future); (18) Macao, Rhône-Alpes, Alsace, Hamburg case pavilions, with revised public and private uses; (19) SKF Shanghai Office (Cases Joint Pavilion 2).
Source: Clare Jacobson.
Post-Expo buildings
The splendor of Expo was not meant to last. Pavilions were designed to stand for six months in Shanghai, and thus avoided the construction necessities that cold winters and long-term resiliency would require. Only five Expo structures – Expo Axis, Expo Center, Expo Culture Center, Theme Pavilion, and China Pavilion – were built to be permanent. According to Huub Buise, Consul, Consulate General Kingdom of the Netherlands, Expo documents stated that the Dutch Pavilion had to be demolished by May 31, 2011.7 It was the responsibility of each country to remove its national pavilion to meet this deadline.
Some building owners responded quickly to their contractual duty. The UK demolished its “Seed Cathedral,” designed by Thomas Heatherwick, soon after the fair closed, dispersing its seed-filled acrylic rods to Chinese schools and through an online sale.8 The building was much loved by visitors and critics alike, and it received Expo’s Gold Pavilion Design Award. When asked why it was not saved, David Martin, Deputy Director of the UK Pavilion, says that it was meant to be a temporary thing, “more lasting in its memory than … in its reality.”9
Some pavilions were designed so that they could be taken down easily and reconstructed on other sites. The UAE sent its Foster-designed building back home, where it is used for the Abu Dhabi Art Fair.10 Other countries looked to rebuild their pavilions in China. The Sweden Pavilion was taken apart and transported to Hebei Province to be part of the Tangshan Caofeidian Ecocity.11 It remains in storage as of summer 2013, “due to lack of funds in the city.”12 The Finland Pavilion was specifically designed to allow it to be reconstructed at another site, but since reconstruction was not realized, “most of its materials were recycled in a sustainable way.”13 The profit of recycling in China makes it likely that materials from this and other demolished buildings were reused.14
In the summer of 2013, long after the May 2011 deadline, many Expo national pavilions – as well as other Expo buildings – remain present on site for a variety of reasons. Some are being reused. The Cuba Pavilion now houses offices for Gung Ho Communications, and the Africa Joint Pavilion is now the Shanghai Expo-Mart, an exhibition center. Other buildings sit abandoned, showing the wear of three years. Portugal’s cork façade has been stripped as if a tree, the Czech Republic has lost its hockey pucks, and all the red flags that covered Croatia have blown away.
The former Expo site is now a patchwork of three-year-old pavilions, fenced-off rubble-strewn plots, and big digs for new developments. I mapped this site in the summer of 2013, three years after Expo, to gauge the changes (Figures 16.1 and 16.2). As the status of the area is changing quickly, I chose the date of July 12, 2013 for this mapping. Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the spruced-up former Greece Pavilion closed just before this date, and the Aviator Theme Park at the site of the US Pavilion held a trial opening soon after. But this mapping shows the footprint on a single day.
Planning the Expo site
“Patchwork” may not be the ideal word to describe the current footprint of Expo 2010 Shanghai China. The buildings on the Puxi site, in fact, remain largely intact. Those on the Pudong side are patchier, but their presence and absence fall mainly according to the location in which they sit.
This is no happy coincidence. The post-Expo redevelopment plan is a somewhat expanded but otherwise minimally changed version of the original Expo plan. And the state-owned investment enterprise in charge of the new plan, Expo Shanghai Group (ESG), under the supervision of the Shanghai Municipal Government, is essentially a continuation (albeit on a smaller scale) of the Shanghai Expo Bureau, which coordinated the preparation and operation of Expo.