He Never Finished a Single Building in Shanghai, Yet This "Stateless" Architect Left a Deep Mark on the City

To look back on his life is to look back on the city's.

The Hungarian architect László Hudec has been talked about a great deal in recent years; almost no one knows the name Richard Paulick. Hudec's mansions and churches still stand in good repair, and in the "Hudec fever" they have become symbols of the glamorous Shanghai of the 1930s. Paulick, by contrast, never left a single completed design in the city — so it is more accurate to call him a teacher and a planner than an architect.

In 1933 Paulick, a 30-year-old German architect, arrived in Shanghai aboard the liner Conte Rosso. From then until he returned to East Germany in October 1949, the "Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan" he helped draft was never put into practice. Judging an architect with not one building to his name looks almost impossible. In fact, what Paulick did for Shanghai mattered far more than a few structures of brick and concrete. In the piece below you will see at least two things.

First, how far ahead of its time the "Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan" was in reading the needs of a modern city — public space, the building of the Port of Shanghai. Second, how that foresight taught the generation that followed him, and kept Shanghai from becoming a Moscow-style city.

Where did the "Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan" come from? And how did Paulick work his own ideas into it? Whether you study Shanghai's history or the building of China's big cities, this is a question you cannot get around.

What kind of city was Shanghai when Paulick arrived?

Wealthy foreign residents kept to the safety of the concessions; poor refugees hid in the shantytowns on their fringes.

Soon after she reached Shanghai, the famous spy Ruth Werner wrote home with a sneer at the place: to become "one hundred percent a Shanghailander," she said, all you had to learn was mahjong, bridge, and how to scold the servants. The foreign wives who lived there she called "pleasure animals, pure and simple" — mad about horse racing and the movies, with no jobs and no housework. She worked under the legendary spy Richard Sorge, and it was she who passed intelligence on British and American atomic-bomb research to the Soviet Union. Her memoir, Sonja's Report, records the gulf between rich and poor she saw in Shanghai with her own eyes.

Her husband at the time, Rudolf Hamburger, was an architect for the Municipal Council of the International Settlement and had worked on the rebuilding of Shanghai's Tilanqiao Prison. It was he who invited Richard Paulick to Shanghai.

Shanghai then was split in two. On the docks, in the cotton mills and in the shantytowns lay the city's cruel side. "The coolies live in poverty and filth, as appalling as the arrogance of the Europeans here," Ruth wrote.

At Suzhou Creek, the two Shanghais ran into each other. After the Battle of Shanghai the city's population jumped from 1.5 million to more than 3 million. In the years between the fighting of 1937 and the Japanese entry into the concessions in 1941 above all, this Shanghai — cut off like an island — enjoyed a strangely "deformed" boom. The Municipal Council, the concessions' governing body, still held power, and transport, commerce and trade in the area carried on as usual.

South of Suzhou Creek was the glittering foreign quarter; north of it were the bombed-out Chinese-administered districts. Refugees poured in and threw up lean-tos and shantytown shacks. Unable to pay the high rents inside the concessions, they could only crowd along the creek, walking every day between the "twin cities" — earning a living inside the concessions, then going back to the shantytowns to sleep.

The Republican-era journalist Tao Juyin recorded the scene: "One stretch of Suzhou Creek was all that separated them: on one side the guns shook the sky, on the other the singing and feasting ran till dawn. Every night when it grew dark, the electric lamps that burned all night in the concessions shone through the gloom and joined the flames over Zhabei, turning half the sky red."

Inside the concessions, business was good. Richard Paulick started as an interior designer at the company of the rich Jewish businessman Sassoon; later, with his brother and a friend, he took over Modern Times, opened a home-furnishings shop, set up a Modern Times branch in Nanjing, and took on stage design.

In a letter to Walter Gropius — the founder of the Bauhaus, a style that began in Germany but came into its own in the United States — Paulick joked at his own expense that in Shanghai he had to live off the rich men of the concessions. Later, weighing whether to move to the United States, he admitted frankly that in sixteen years in Shanghai he had completed no buildings, which left him nothing to trade on in American architectural circles. "Since I came here [Shanghai] I have mainly taught and done city planning, and built very little. What Modern Times made were all interior odds and ends. The railway projects I designed are still sitting in a drawer, waiting for an American loan to fall out of the sky."

Paulick helped Jewish refugees. After the occupation, Jews were confined to the Tilanqiao area of Hongkou, and Paulick's firm hired large numbers of them; with their work permits they could leave the restricted quarter and come to the office in the Tongfu Building on Bubbling Well Road (today's Nanjing West Road).

In 1943 Paulick took a teaching post at St. John's University. Hou Li, an associate professor at Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning who studies Paulick, found in his papers a pay notice sent by the St. John's accounting office on August 13, 1948, urging him to collect his salary on time, no later than the 20th. Hou Li explains: "The fabi was losing value every day. A day late — even a few hours late — and the salary you actually got was not the same." One week after that letter, Chiang Ching-kuo, backed by the Nanjing government, forced through the Gold Yuan currency reform in Shanghai, and the runaway inflation that followed was the backdrop to the last stretch of Paulick's time in the city.

The "Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan": rebuilding the city after the war

Paulick knew no Chinese, and after he lost his German citizenship in 1938 and became a "stateless person," he could move only within the concessions. Even so, he was amazed by a port that worked a miracle on nothing but human muscle — men hauling carts and carrying loads on their shoulders.

The Port of Shanghai handled more cargo than Rotterdam, then the most advanced port in Europe. Yet there was no single port at all: piers owned by individual foreign trading houses sprawled at will along both banks of the Huangpu River. The riverfront was so narrow that even ordinary barges and trucks could not be used, let alone modern loading gear.

"We used to boast about it in one easy line: 'By then Shanghai had become the largest port in the Far East.' What is shocking is that behind those dazzling trade and economic figures stood labor so cheap it is hard to imagine." At the exhibition, a fellow professional told Hou Li how his forebears had come to Shanghai from Zhoushan. Zhoushan men worked as pilots in Shanghai; every ocean-going ship that reached Wusongkou had to transfer its cargo to small boats, and his forebears were the ones who guided those boats into the Huangpu and found the right pier to load and unload.

A modern, centralized port was the centerpiece of the Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan. Paulick and the rest of the design team studied many of the world's great ports of the day, hoping to bring in mechanized handling. In the meeting minutes, Hou Li found Paulick returning again and again to how urgent a modern port was: miss the moment, and Hong Kong would rise instead.

But this hugely expensive idea ran into opposition from the Whangpoo Conservancy Board and the harbor authorities. Silt in the Yangtze and the Huangpu was heavy, and a modern port meant serious dredging problems. The one government body that backed it was Customs, which wanted unified control over the scattered piers along the banks so it could crack down on smuggling by sea and take back the piers held by foreign trading houses and the Green Gang.

"Even today most of Shanghai's port traffic is still bulk cargo. Before Yangshan Port came into its own, Ningbo's Beilun Port was the largest container port in the Yangtze River Delta."

The designers on the drafting team and the municipal departments argued hard over this ambitious postwar reconstruction plan: how far ahead of its time it should be, whether it could be done at all, whether to build a modern Shanghai out in front of everyone else or to put limited money into more pressing questions of daily life. Each of them held a regular job elsewhere and hurried to the Bureau of Public Works after work every day to read through the data the survey team had gathered, then met to discuss it. This badly paid "side job" often ran late into the night.

Another forward-looking idea that caused a fight was the plan for Pudong. Paulick first designated Pudong purely as farmland and housing, so as not to put pressure on the port and its piers. When the plan's first draft was published, factory owners who had already built plants in Pudong were up in arms and protested loudly: it would leave them unable to renew their building permits when they wanted to expand or rebuild.

The two battles of Shanghai had flattened almost all of the Chinese-administered districts; once their houses were destroyed, most owners fled with nothing but a land deed in hand. But rebuilding after the war was a chance to re-parcel land. Paulick and his colleagues hoped to learn from Japan's re-parceling after earthquakes: pull scattered privately owned plots together and require every owner to give up 15 to 30 percent of his land for roads and public green space. This ratio, drawn from the "Garden City" model, was without question too far ahead of its time, and owners protested fiercely.

Enthusiasm for the reconstruction plan spread to the public as well. Hou Li once read a letter in the party newspaper from a reader writing under the pen name "Yizhi," who opposed the elevated expressway in the second draft. Zhao Zukang, then mayor of Shanghai, had written an article arguing that widening existing roads could do nothing for a city's traffic as a whole, and that only a systematic network of express roads would raise overall efficiency. "Yizhi" gave no quarter, demanding to know where the Nationalist government would find the money for an elevated road around the edge of the city.

From the first draft to the third, from far-sighted ambition to sensible compromise with reality, this ambitious reconstruction plan never got off the page. In the preface to the second draft the designers wrote that set beside the all-out city planning of Europe and America, Shanghai's part-timers, for all their passion, were no better than "a mantis trying to stop a chariot." Zhao Zukang was blunter still, listing "three difficulties" in the way: first, the fate of the country was undecided and local finances were spent; second, with people struggling to get by, talk of construction was extravagance; third, the social, land and transport policies that a metropolitan plan had to work alongside were nowhere in sight, and getting the various parties to cooperate was hard.

On March 19, 1949, Zhao Zukang met in Nanjing with Hou Debang, Mao Yisheng, Yun Zhen and Gu Yuquan of the Chinese Institute of Engineers — five men in all — and they agreed to write jointly to both the Nationalist and Communist sides, then at war. The open letter urged both to spare factories, mines, transport and other public infrastructure: "If the war does serious damage to cities like Shanghai, it will set China's economy back twenty years!"

The third draft of the Greater Shanghai plan was finished between spring and summer in 1949, by which point only four people were left on the design team: Paulick, Zhong Yaohua, Cheng Shifu and Jin Jingchang. Handed to Chen Yi, the new government's mayor, the reconstruction plan was shelved all the same.

What did the unbuilt plan leave behind?

In the summer of 1949, Paulick, then 47, was photographed with Zhang Zhaokang, his student at St. John's University, on the roof garden of Huang Zuoshen's house. Whether the third draft was finished by then is unclear, but Paulick, belly out, is grinning.

In his last years in Shanghai, Paulick did have chances to leave for other countries, and they all slipped through his fingers. In 1947 St. John's University and the University of Florida's architecture school planned a scholar exchange, but after a great deal of trouble it came to nothing.

The Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan gathered a remarkable group of modernist architects. Zhang Zhaokang, in the photograph with Paulick, became one of postwar Taiwan's first generation of architects and designed Tunghai University in Taichung. Wang Dahong also went to Taiwan, where he designed the National Palace Museum. Luke Him Sau went to Hong Kong. Eric Guning, once an accomplished jockey at the Shanghai racecourse, took part in designing large public housing estates in Hong Kong too. Hou Li tells what became of this headstrong architect and planner: "He was too much of an idealist. On a development in Yau Ma Tei in Hong Kong he didn't use up the full floor area ratio, and a developer took him to court. He won the case, but after that no developer would hire him, and he ended his life in poverty."

Paulick's students out of St. John's University, such as Li Dehua and Luo Xiaowei, became mainstays of the architecture profession in China. In another piece of research Hou Li recorded the "veiled contest" in 1950s Shanghai between local planners and architects and the Soviet experts. After Paulick left, the Soviet planner Mukhin drew up a plan for the city, running it through with large-scale axes and vast squares, the emblems of the socialist era.

"Looking at it today, the Greater Shanghai Metropolitan Plan was not perfect, but it shaped a group of young people — men who had just graduated and joined the Bureau of Public Works in the 1940s, or who were Paulick's students at St. John's, and who took it in as the plan was being drafted. They saw that what Mukhin offered was a design philosophy already out of date, and in the end his version was not adopted," Hou Li said. "Without those three years of racing the clock in the gap between the war of resistance and the civil war, you can imagine that in the 1950s, when China was learning from the Soviet Union in everything, Shanghai's urban space might have turned out far more 'Moscow-ized.'"

In October 1949 Paulick, after sixteen years in Shanghai, went back to East Germany. He was lucky in one respect: the war had not cost him his craft, and he worked on the rebuilding of the East German State Opera, on Berlin's reconstruction plan, and on plans for several new towns. This German designer, who left no building of his own in Shanghai, was gradually forgotten in the foreign country where he had spent those years.

If you want to know more about Paulick and the Shanghai he planned, read 《鲍立克在上海——近代中国大都市的战后规划与重建》 (Paulick in Shanghai: Postwar Planning and Reconstruction in a Modern Chinese Metropolis), edited by Hou Li and Wang Yibing. We also put some basic questions to Hou Li.

Q: QDaily

A: Hou Li

Q: When people hear "Greater Shanghai Plan," many think first of the Nationalist government's design for Jiangwan in the 1930s — the stadium and library built then still stand near Wujiaochang. What is the difference between the two plans?

A: While I was setting up the exhibition at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center I came across several elderly gentlemen who thought the show was about the road names near Wujiaochang that all begin with the character for "nation" and about Jiangwan Stadium. I went over and explained it to them at length. This is a common confusion, and it even turns up in architecture and planning academia. In the exhibition's afterword I put a passage from Paulick himself: the Wujiaochang-area Greater Shanghai Plan was no more than a building project, a few structures put up as a protest against imperialism. It designed a single municipal administrative center tucked into one corner of Shanghai. It was not, in any real sense, a master plan for the city.

Q: This reconstruction plan, which was never built, designed housing for workers, marked out resettlement areas for refugees, and provided "neighborhood units" for ordinary residents. Why did the "bottom of society" take up so much room in it?

A: Even now, city planners are still working toward long-term urban development built around the public interest, and trying to speak for the majority at the bottom who are easily overlooked — though of course there is always a gap between the goal and what actually comes of it.

Paulick once joked at his own expense, in a letter to Gropius, that he could only stay alive by leaning on the city's rich. But in drafting the plan he did not let that make him forget the people at the bottom. I think he was a great idealist and a shrewd realist at the same time; "shrewd" is not a criticism here — holding the two in balance takes extraordinary wisdom.

Stressing workers' interests and believing in the power of state intervention was the keynote of that era. Keynesianism was also in fashion in capitalist societies then — the public housing built under Roosevelt's New Deal, for instance. That was the historical setting in which city planning was established as a discipline and flourished.

Q: After he went back to East Germany, was Paulick politically persecuted?

A: As far as I know he was lucky, and things went relatively smoothly. After returning to East Germany he took a new wife, built many new towns in the 1950s and 1960s, and worked on the rebuilding of Berlin. His friend Rudolf Hamburger had a far rougher time: the Soviets took him for a double agent and put him in a Gulag labor camp. Paulick later found a way to get Rudolf out of the Gulag, and he came back to work in East Germany.

Q: How do you see Paulick in relation to the spirit of the Bauhaus?

A: In its time the Bauhaus school was a thunderclap; it called on everyone to turn toward the modern. But modernity is unfinished even today — or it would be better to say it exists in a mixed state. We also reflect now on the limits of the Bauhaus: must human society really develop as the Bauhaus imagined, climbing step by step toward some "higher form"? Or, put another way, what the modern spirit is needs a different definition in each era.

The historic buildings and urban fabric we care about preserving today, for example, were not valued in Paulick's day. What people thought about then was pure "efficiency"; "progress" meant express roads, airports, ports. It was never petit-bourgeois — they would not have debated whether to keep the street cafés. Today we actually tend more toward the middle ground: some things once considered backward are now seen as tradition.

People no longer talk much about defining "modernity." In its place comes "hybridity," which stresses plural values. How to tell "tradition," "backwardness" and "advancement" apart is a much bigger question.

(Images courtesy of Hou Li and Tongji University Press)