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国外网站对新天地的报道(英文) [推荐]
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David Armstrong, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, January 26, 2003
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Shanghai
Called Xintiandi, the two-city-block complex is strikingly different from the flashy, high-rise developments sweeping this metropolis of 16 million. Instead of knocking them down, the designers went to great lengths to preserve the historic, low-rise buildings in the area.
Xintiandi, a wildly popular destination that draws about 50,000 visitors a day, is the creation of the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The Chicago architectural firm, well-known worldwide, designed such Bay Area landmarks as Davies Symphony Hall, the Bank of America building and the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport.
Shanghai, China's resurgent financial center and largest city, is drawing heavily on the 180-person San Francisco office of Skidmore Owings to reinvent itself . Today's Shanghai is a classic boomtown, a city in a hurry, with big plans to overtake New York, Tokyo and London as capitals of commerce.
The Shanghai municipal government hired Skidmore Owings in the mid-1990s to help realize its dreams of becoming a world city again. Since then, the firm has drawn up a sweeping plan to redevelop 5 miles of industrial land on the banks of the Huangpu River in the heart of Shanghai during the next decade. It is also helping to design a $3.5 billion, 128-acre residential district.
Skidmore Owings, which began operating in China in the early 1990s when it designed the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Beijing, is one of many global firms drawn to China, the fastest-growing major country in the world. Averaging 8 percent annual growth for the past decade, China, whose 1.3 billion people make it the most populous nation in the world, has harnessed Western technology and finance as engines of growth.
Skidmore Owings, which was founded in 1936, opened a San Francisco office 10 years later, initially to work on projects for the U.S. military on the Pacific Rim.
These days, Skidmore Owings is planning and designing 10 million square feet of office space in China, a country that accounts for 30 percent of the business of the San Francisco office, according to Yosh Asato, its director of marketing. The firm is especially active in Beijing and Shanghai.
Xintiandi -- small, precious, costly -- is the jewel in the crown of Skidmore Owings' Shanghai projects. In part, that's because adaptive reuse of old buildings is rare in China, said John Lund Kriken, a Skidmore Owings partner in San Francisco who headed the firm's efforts in Xintiandi (which means New Heaven and Earth in Chinese).
Ordinarily, Kriken said, old buildings in China are seen as useless relics and simply knocked down. Xintiandi's buildings -- 1930s flats and apartments graced with traditional Shanghainese stone gateways called shikumen -- were saved from the wrecker's ball. The facades were spruced up and the interiors gutted, and the buildings were transformed into shops, bars, nightclubs and restaurants.
CAPITALISM ON DISPLAY
The first block opened for business in 2000, and the second block was finished late last year. Now, Xintiandi is festooned with shops such as Cheese & Fizz, where Romeo y Julieta brand Cuban cigars cost $11 each, and watering holes such as TMSK, where the black-clad staff dons headsets and pours cocktails in primary colors for a trendy young clientele.
"It's state-of-the-art redevelopment," Kriken said. "Now that it's successful, people realize that heritage buildings have value."
Skidmore Owings partnered with a Hong Kong developer, the Shui On Group, to create Xintiandi, the first phase of a $3.5 billion project to redevelop Shanghai's Taipingqiao district. Taipingqiao, Kriken said, will join office buildings and shops with badly needed modern housing when it is finished, by the end of this decade.
Vincent Lo, who heads the Shui On Group, jump-started the Taipingqiao project by first building Xintiandi at a cost of $175 million, according to Albert Chan, Shui On's general manager for planning and development.
The developer tapped Skidmore Owings San Francisco to get Xintiandi moving because of its experience with big projects, said Chan, who graduated in architecture from UC Berkeley and moved to Shanghai in 1997.
"There were many challenges in the development of Xintiandi," he said. "The existing buildings were in much worse shape than we anticipated. The approval processes were unclear.
"Initially," Chan recalled, "seven out of 10 potential tenants did not know what we were talking about when we explained the adaptive reuse concept, looking at the pile of rubble and dilapidated houses in front of them. And the three that did understand did not believe we could do it."
Nevertheless, Xintiandi, which features European-style outdoor dining and shopping in open-air courtyards, was a great success in Shanghai, and more than a dozen Chinese cities have contacted Shui On about developing similar projects, Chan said.
INSTANT LAKE AND PARK
When the developers of Xintiandi decided they wanted a lake to provide beauty and recreation for the neighborhood, they used the power of eminent domain to move out 4,000 residents to make room for the lake. Moving them took just 43 days, Kriken said.
Deciding that they wanted a park to rim the lake, Shanghai authorities marked off land for a park, and brought in 50-year-old trees from other parts of China to give the landscape a mature look.
All told, relocating residents, digging the lake and carving out the park took "maybe eight or nine months,' Kriken said.
Presto! A new Xintiandi.
"No one knew it would be so big," said Peter Lee, a Shanghai urban planner who spent a month in San Francisco advising the Skidmore Owings architects on the Xintiandi project. Unlike the high-rise development that marks most of Shanghai, Lee said, Xintiandi's two- and three-story buildings, linked by winding lanes, offer an engagingly human scale. "Everybody from outside who comes to Shanghai has to go there. It's become very famous," he said.
On a recent weekday afternoon in Shanghai, a young man who gave his name simply as Zheng said that he and his friends like to visit Xintiandi mainly to window-shop and scope out women.
It's interesting to pop in for a drink at cutting-edge establishments such as T8, a public restaurant with an exclusive private club on the second floor, he allowed, but the shops are too expensive.
MAGNET FOR VISITORS
But Xintiandi holds attractions for such visitors as San Francisco lawyer Angeli Cheng, who alighted in Shanghai on holiday last week with half a dozen friends and relatives. The group dubbed itself "the gang of seven."
"It's just fun," Cheng said of Xintiandi, which she has visited three times in the past four months. The shopping there is pricey, she said, but the food is excellent, and there's a greater variety of Chinese cuisine on offer in Xintiandi and elsewhere in Shanghai than back home in San Francisco.
Despite the success of Xintiandi, the project is just one item on Skidmore Owings' agenda in China. In addition to its ambitious projects in Shanghai, Skidmore Owings is designing major projects in Beijing, China's capital city, including a science park and an extension of its World Trade Center complex.
Doing business in China is gradually getting easier, said Skidmore Owings partner Gene Schnair. Business should continue to become more transparent and consistent, he ventured, now that China is a member of the WTO, which sets rules for direct foreign investment and international joint ventures.
DIFFERENT BUSINESS STYLE
That said, China, which is still ruled by political heirs of the men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in Xintiandi more than 80 years ago, still does not do business the way capitalist countries do.
"There's still a long way to go to have open investment and capital flow," said Ellen Lou, a Hong Kong native and associate partner at Skidmore Owings. However, commercial contracts, which were often disregarded by Chinese companies when China first opened to the capitalist world in the late 1970s, ''are very serious documents and are honored," she said.
Now that Xintiandi is finished, its San Francisco architects and Hong Kong developers are moving on to other projects, such as the decadelong build-out envisioned for the surrounding Taipingqiao district.
"The idea is not to build a high-rise city, but five- or six-story centers, with bookstores, piazzas and so on. It's a neighborhood approach," Kriken said.
"A lot of the work that's going on in Shanghai is just growth," he said. "We are trying to create for the long-term, and make the city as livable as possible."
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