A Forgotten Mansion Is Now a Creative Park. Could It Be Your Doorway to Rediscovering Shanghai?

Columbia Circle survives today as a baffling name on a wall along Shanghai's Xinhua Road. This old mansion is where it came from.

No. 1262 West Yan'an Road is a thoroughly unremarkable compound gate. A pale metal plate carries a name in gold brush-style characters: Shanghai Institute of Biological Products Co., Ltd. The company made vaccines. The BCG shot, the chickenpox shot and the rabies shot were all developed and produced here.

The compound is shaped like a bottle — a narrow neck, a broad belly — which keeps it out of sight from the street unless you are looking down from above. Few people know that behind the staid facade lies 90 years of expatriate history, or that this neighborhood once had a code name nobody now remembers: Columbia Circle.

More than 90 years ago this was where the American residents of Shanghai's International Settlement gathered. It still holds the only swimming pool in Shanghai built to imperial measurements. Beside the pool stands a baroque building, well preserved inside and out, with a shield-shaped emblem carved into the fireplace: 13 stars above, and below them three nested letter C's, the initials of the Columbia Country Club. The name Columbia Circle comes from there.

Ninety years on, the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products (hereafter SIBP) has leased the land to Vanke, which hired the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) to turn it into a new creative-industry park. Will new life in old buildings wake this dormant history up? Can modern living make people curious about the past? That was never what Vanke and OMA set out to do, but the place is a doorway into Shanghai's past all the same.

"Columbia Circle": A History of Expatriates

In 1924 there was no elevated highway here, no Shanghai Jiao Tong University, no Shanghai Film Art Center. This stretch of farmland on the edge of the booming metropolis did not even have a street name.

While the warlords were busy fighting each other across Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the foreigners of the International Settlement took their chance to push past the settlement's boundary and build roads over the fields. Avenue Amherst (today's Xinhua Road) and Avenue Columbia (today's Panyu Road) came out of that campaign of extra-settlement road-building by the Shanghai Municipal Council.

Property developers followed. The American-owned Asia Realty Company bought up more than a hundred mu of nearby farmland, plot by plot, and redivided the land. A period advertisement for Columbia Circle, printed in warm colors, gave the development a Chinese name: Puyi Model Village. "Model" stood for modern; "village" sold a pastoral dream inside the city. Unlike the lane houses common at the time, this was meant for expatriates who wanted to go back to the countryside without giving up modern plumbing and modern life, in Western-style houses.

The Hungarian architect László Hudec was invited to design homes inside Columbia Circle, and what he left to what is now the Xinhua Road historic conservation area is 13 buildings, no two in the same style. The Sun Fo Villa in today's Columbia Park is one of them; its owner was Sun Fo, the eldest son of Sun Yat-sen.

At this year's Shanghai Fashion Week the villa served as a show venue. It still has its pointed-arch windows, its thick round wooden doors, its curved vaulted ceilings and its enamel bathtub, with a small door in the wall behind the tub — an access hole left for repairs. Hudec designed the villa as his own home, then gave it to Sun Fo to thank him for stepping in to settle a problem on one of his projects. He never spent a single day living in it. In 1949 Sun Fo sold the house and moved his family to Hong Kong.

All those expatriates living together produced the Columbia Country Club. The ornate details inside the clubhouse are an accurate picture of Shanghai's golden years in the 1920s and 1930s. The ground floor was the ballroom, ringed by eight twisted Corinthian columns whose capitals are carved with tendrils and buds. Upstairs, several rooms still have their Plexiglas doorknobs. The baroque building was designed by Elliott Hazzard.

The club, the pool, the bowling alley and the wide lawns made this the leisure center for the settlement's foreign residents, until the Second World War broke the glamour apart.

Hazzard himself ended up trapped in the house he had designed. In 1943 the Japanese army took the site over and renamed it the Fourth Internment Camp, West Shanghai. According to a Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences research project on the Allied civilian internment camps in Shanghai, and later work by Professor Su Zhiliang of the Center for Urban Culture Research at Shanghai Normal University in 2015, the Japanese army set up 20 camps in Shanghai between February 1942 and 1945. Hazzard was later moved to the much larger Longhua camp, and died there.

After the founding of the People's Republic, the Columbia Country Club and the Sun Fo Villa were assigned to SIBP. Researchers worked out of the villa, and SIBP put up a nine-story research block in the middle of what had been the great lawn. Designed by Guo Bo, son of the writer Guo Moruo, it cut the enormous inner courtyard in two.

Across SIBP's sixty years the old country club turned into a mystery. Hardly anyone came in from West Yan'an Road and down the long narrow passage to this pocket of 1920s and 1930s luxury. The pool stayed open to institute staff and their families. The arched gateposts stayed too, and at the shallow end the mosaic tiles still spell out "Shallow End." The revolutionary decades left few marks here, apart from the ram's-head relief beside the pool that used to spout water; it was smashed during the campaign to destroy the Four Olds.

How Do You Renovate an Old Building at "China Speed"?

"But we didn't want to just restore a few antique buildings," Chris van Duijn, the lead architect at OMA, the firm renovating Columbia Park, told QDaily. They wanted to make room here for entirely new uses, not restore a few empty monuments for people to look at.

Urban renewal and the reuse of historic buildings have become a global preoccupation, and OMA — the firm behind the CCTV headquarters in Beijing — has joined in. Fondazione Prada is one of its best-known recent works: inside a former distillery in Milan it added an exhibition hall, a tower and a cinema. It also turned a restaurant that had sat abandoned in Moscow's Gorky Park for nearly thirty years into the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

The oldest structure OMA has taken on is in Venice: the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, first built in the 13th century and rebuilt in the 16th. OMA inserted vertical circulation into the interior, and the trading house that had watched Venice rise and fall became a department store.

Reworking old buildings is now a fashion, and not every attempt comes off. Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, the lead architect on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, has written an attack on this wave of nostalgia, which he says has turned into a shortcut. Developers and architects restore the fabric without thinking, call the job done, and never learn "how to keep the past alive." Like cheap fake-antique construction, these genuinely old buildings end up all surface, unable to carry the new uses given to them. Such designs, Pestellini Laparelli says, come out of political correctness rather than any real concern for people, and amount to nothing more than consumption.

What are old buildings for today, and how do you make those uses work? We have written several times about AMO, OMA's think tank — the squad with the name spelled backwards, which studies what kinds of activity can be implanted in a space. It designed the runway inside Fondazione Prada.

Van Duijn says another of AMO's continuing subjects is the countryside under urbanization. "On those projects abroad, we're not purely designers, and we don't stop at technical solutions. More often we join the developer's team."

At Columbia Park, though, OMA had very little room to explore. The work concentrated on the physical space: new-material bridges added inside the old buildings, for instance, to loosen up stiff floor plans and make them work better for creative offices.

OMA also took care to open up sight lines, "stuffing" a glass box into the ground floor of the research block that cuts the courtyard in two. The northern courtyard is the more public one, ringed by the Michelin restaurant, cafés, the pool and the co-working space that will move in. The southern courtyard is more private, belonging to the people working in the office buildings. The glass links the two visually.

Van Duijn still remembers the first meeting with Vanke, where Vanke held up Fondazione Prada as the reference for Columbia Park. "We're flattered that everyone likes that project — we like it too — but the trouble is that these are two completely different cases." Beyond the difference in what the buildings are for, the other word he kept coming back to was context.

The first thing to get used to is China speed. Research for Fondazione Prada began in 2007, and as late as last year OMA was still designing the final building in the complex. "We spent three months imagining one entrance. You could call that a misfortune, but design cycles that long are normal in Europe. The Garage in Moscow also took us five years."

The Chinese urban-renewal projects OMA works on run on design cycles of two or three months. "You discuss a scheme in a meeting today and the revised scheme has to be ready tomorrow." What sits under the difference between Chinese and European speed, Van Duijn stresses, is land tenure. Unlike European clients, a developer like Vanke does not own the land; what it wins at auction is a lease of 10 to 20 years, and making money inside that window is the practical problem.

Vanke holds a 20-year lease on Columbia Park. Red Town, another creative park in the same Changning District, has just reached the end of its ten-year lease and will close this year.

The other challenge is that things keep changing. Unlike the renovation of a single building, Columbia Park is meant to be a mixed-use compound built around offices but also holding lifestyle businesses, exhibitions and public space. Vanke is ambitious about this piece of prime Shanghai land and has imagined every kind of business and function for it.

"One building was going to be food and drink at first, then for a while it became a bookstore, then they wanted office space, and now it's back to food and drink," Van Duijn says. When the use is unclear, so is the design.

"It's more like live-action painting," he explains. "That's not to say Europe's longer design cycles are better. Arguing about which is good and which is bad is pointless. What matters is that this is the real context we have to work in."

Adidas, Sound Art, City Cycling — What Else Will Happen Here?

The designers are boxed in. Vanke is very busy.

The renovation has barely started, and yet No. 1262 West Yan'an Road, its gates shut for more than sixty years, has suddenly begun throwing events in one old building after another.

Adidas held a product launch here last year on a "blue night," the whole compound washed in blue light and a giant logo "floating" on the surface of the pool. The artist Zhang Ding staged a solo show from his Control Club project — a giant sound-field installation of 16 channels, 10 frequency bands and 59 loudspeakers — in the annex, a 10-meter-high open hall that SIBP once used as a production workshop.

The early creative parks all seemed to run on one formula. On one side of it: old buildings, big factory halls, artists and cheap rent. On the other: pilgrims, tourists, rents rising with the tide and land values that promise more. But plenty of people got sick long ago of the round fans printed with women in qipao at Tianzifang, the packed snack stalls and the shuffling crowds.

That formula has expired, and second landlords like Vanke now have to work at running a place.

Who is the ideal tenant? "I doubt anyone remembers that there was a McDonald's at Xintiandi when it opened," says the manager in charge of Columbia Park, who uses Xintiandi to explain that an operator has to control which businesses go in and in what proportion. "McDonald's came into the Chinese market back in the nineties and it's still a stable tenant. If I remember right, they signed a long lease with Xintiandi. But five years in, the operator realized something was wrong, paid compensation of its own accord, and asked the McDonald's to leave, because it didn't fit what the place was becoming."

"Have you ever walked around the park where IBM sits? Standing outside IBM's gate you can feel an invisible wall. Its corporate culture is too strong. What service could we possibly provide? They don't even need us to recruit interns." For Vanke, which in recent years has talked up its shift into an "urban services provider," a company like that needs nothing from the park's operator, so there is no invisible value to create. "They can pay rent very well, which is good, but they aren't the perfect tenant. They're just a very good anchor."

Naked Hub, which runs co-working space as a brand, will open another location inside Columbia Park, and Vanke hopes it will act as a catfish in the tank, breaking down the walls that usually stand between companies in the same park.

The warm-up events also included a bike ride. Last December, Vanke teamed up with the bicycle brand WKUP and the architecture media outlet AssBook for "Ride Awake," asking architects and urban planners to plot routes weaving through several of the city's historic conservation areas: Yongjia Road, Jianguo Road, Huashan Road. Hudec has plainly become an internet celebrity in recent years, and every sort of event wants to borrow his heat. The riders stopped at old Hudec buildings along the way to take photographs and to look at the scale of the conservation districts and the state of the cycling infrastructure. Columbia Park was the finish line, where everyone talked the ride over afterwards.

"Why does a bike ride have to go around Lake Tai or along the Huangpu River? It can happen in the middle of the city, built around exploring architecture and tied to the city's history." Columbia Park has run several rounds of an event it calls gossiping about old buildings.

The early creative parks were islands with no connection to what surrounded them. You may still go out to M50 for a show now and then, but most people cannot name a single thing near it. "Linkage" is a word Vanke uses a lot — with the Shanghai International Film Festival, for example. The compound is about a kilometer from the Shanghai Film Art Center, an easy walk.

"We hear the complaint all the time: every year at the film festival, people come out of the cinemas at the Shanghai Film Art Center and can only take the subway somewhere else. There seems to be nowhere suitable and concentrated nearby where they can stop and talk," the manager says. Columbia Park can offer space for film press conferences and salons. But it also has a potential competitor to watch: renovation plans for the Shanghai Film Art Center and the blocks around it remain unclear.

Fashion is the other industry Vanke wants to link up with. The pool and the Sun Fo Villa both suit runways and exhibitions. "Beyond the display end of the fashion business, we want to work with universities like Donghua University and Shanghai University of Engineering Science, to get upstream in the chain, meet designers, hold forums and talks here."

"Of course, from one end of the chain to the other, how much rent each node can pay is also something we have to consider."

"We want to put a few labels on Columbia, the way theater makes people think of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival." Those labels include fashion, film and historic conservation area. The latest post on Columbia Park's official account was about David Beckham coming here to shoot a fashion spread. Behind this somewhat scattered set of labels, the manager says, "we're still testing, to see what sticks in the end."

(Images not otherwise credited come from Vanke.)