Six Years to Restore One Century-Old Shanghai Building: What Does That Take? | 100 People With Ideas

The architect has a joke of his own: "Every great project comes with a pile of grubby compromises."

When Ling Yingsong first laid eyes on the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce building, it was a blotched facade, doors and windows knocked askew, empty for years. It stood on a patch of open ground at the corner of North Suzhou Road and North Henan Road, together with a weed-choked triangular gatehouse a few dozen meters away.

Ling had just left the historic-building restoration department at the East China Architectural Design Institute for Shanghai Lianchuang Architectural Design Group, where he set up an independent unit called the Urban Regeneration Design Institute (OUR). The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce was the first project he won at the new firm.

The two design teams bidding against him were both outfits he knew well: one was the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tongji University, his alma mater; the other was his old employer, the East China Architectural Design Institute.

Looking back at that bid, Ling thinks luck played a part. "Maybe it's because I understood them," he says.

The win brought a marathon. Basic architectural surveying; collecting and checking historical records; round after round of review meetings with the Shanghai Historic Building Protection Center, the Shanghai Academy of Real Estate Sciences, the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute, Tongji University, and OCT (Overseas Chinese Town), the developer that had taken the land — and the restoration plan revised, then revised again. The building is now in its sixth year of restoration.

Ling still says he is happy about it. He is an architect who specializes in historic buildings, and he had wanted to work on this one for a long time.

The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce was formally founded in 1912, the year the Republic of China was established. According to A Pictorial History of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (《上海总商会历史图录》), published by Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, Shenbao and other major newspapers ran the "First Announcement of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce" for several days beginning on February 29, 1912. It read: "With the rising of the revolutionary army and the liberation of Shanghai, the former General Chamber of Commerce, appointed as it was by the old Ministry of Commerce, should rightly be abolished. The business community will reorganize under the name Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, to make its unity plain." From then on the chamber raised money privately to build its own headquarters — the first time in modern Chinese history that a chamber-of-commerce assembly hall was built with privately raised funds.

The three-story building, in fair-faced red brick, was designed by Atkinson & Dallas, a British firm with considerable standing in old Shanghai, and is a representative piece of late Western classicism. Ground was broken in 1913 and the work was finished in 1916. It was expanded once afterward: the same firm added a stretch of perimeter wall, and a gatehouse — trapezoidal in plan, its facade in washed-stone — as the chamber's main entrance.

In its 17 active years, the chamber received delegations from the American Chamber of Commerce, organized exhibitions of Chinese-made goods, held diplomatic conferences, and ran the settlement talks after the Jiangsu-Zhejiang War. It was a direct witness to the rise and fall of Shanghai's national-bourgeois chambers of commerce, and of the city's industry and commerce as a whole.

In 1929 the Nationalist central government dissolved the chamber. The building later housed the Shanghai Commercial Vocational School and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce Business Supplementary School, and that change of use brought changes to the original structure.

After 1949 the building went through several more transformations. The heaviest structural change came in the late 1950s, when it was turned into an electronic-components assembly plant. The four sloped roof faces were torn off and replaced with a square concrete slab, which effectively made the roof a fourth floor. The third-floor balconies, originally half-open, were all sealed. It was not only the main building: the gatehouse facing North Suzhou Road got a flat concrete top of its own, and the words "Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce" that had crowned it were wiped away in the process.

In 2010 OCT acquired a large tract of land west of North Henan Road and launched the Suhewan (Suzhou Creek Bay) project, planning apartments for sale, shops and office towers, and bringing in the boutique hotel brand Bulgari. The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce building sits inside the hotel zone.

An OCT staff member told QDaily that once the restoration is finished, the developer plans to fit out the whole building as a banquet hall: room for a Chinese restaurant, plus a bar and a cigar lounge, with the modern equipment needed to host events and weddings.

Before Ling and his Urban Regeneration team took charge of the work, OCT had in fact asked David Chipperfield — who led the design and restoration of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) — for a proposal. Chipperfield's argument was this: since the original sloped roof had been destroyed outright, why not add an entirely new roof structure, in similar materials and at a fitting scale, so that old and new each hold their own ground and still sit well together?

The developer did not approve it. Chipperfield had used that logic on a German museum scarred by the Second World War, and the decision-makers felt it rested on a social and cultural setting in which "Germany does not wish to recreate the past." The value behind restoring the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce was the opposite: bringing back the city's former glory.

Ling later said he agreed with the concept his client had put forward. "Reviving Shanghai's glory" fit the cultural direction of the moment, he thought. He also had one hard premise going in. The building is on the third list of outstanding historic buildings approved for protection by the Shanghai municipal government, at Class III, which means the restoration plan could not alter the exterior facade or the main structure.

The full scope of the work: restore the building's original appearance; repair a century of decay in the structure and in the interior and exterior walls; restore original details such as the wood floors, the molding and the colored tiles; and raise the building's functional specifications for restaurant and banquet use — a higher fire rating, insulation for the outer walls and for windows and doors, and the planning and installation of air conditioning, ventilation and drainage.

But the central question is this: faced with alterations made by different occupants in different eras, what should an architect keep, what should he tear out, and what should he restore? Compared with the technical work, sorting out the building's historical timeline and reasoning out its architectural logic is by far the more complicated part. And every time Ling's team made a big decision, it had to produce evidence strong enough to convince the client, the university professors and the government's heritage authorities.

Restoring an old building and putting up a new one on empty ground call for two different kinds of thinking. The second asks an architect to use and create with a whole set of elements — form, texture, material, light, color. The first depends more on the architect making one choice after another, guided by his grasp of the building's own logic.

"We have to weigh each restoration detail as a whole — the building's historical value, meaning the moment that matters most to its architectural form; whether the restoration technique is feasible; its artistic value," Ling says.

The chamber's perimeter wall shows what that kind of "logical choice" looks like.

A stretch of wall about 30 meters long once marked the boundary of the chamber's property. When restoration began, all of it, like the gatehouse at the entrance, wore the washed-stone finish then in fashion. Cleaning the surface, workers accidentally knocked off a patch of that finish and found that the section nearest the main building was the same fair-faced red brick as the building's outer walls, with finely worked molding.

That overturned the architects' first reading of the wall's material and age. The whole restoration team went back to surveying it and digging through records. In the end they worked out that the wall had most likely gone up in two phases.

In the first, the chamber had not yet acquired its present plot, so only a short red-brick wall was built. In the early 1920s, when it bought a larger piece of land, it extended that wall to its present length and built the gatehouse. Since the gatehouse used the washed-stone facade common at the time, the workers could not be bothered to knock the old wall down and rebuild it — they simply covered the red brick with a matching layer of washed-stone.

Given that, should the restored wall show washed-stone the whole way along, or should the red brick be laid bare? That became the sticking point between the architects and the project assessment panel.

When the second stretch went up, Ling explains, the architects of that era put the building's overall unity first. Red brick was not, in their eyes, a structure worth keeping; washed-stone was the fashionable material. So for the sake of a consistent whole, they covered everything. But from today's restoration standpoint, the wall has lost its function of marking a boundary and survives instead as a decorative display wall. So Ling decided to design it as a "scroll that displays history," showing the washed-stone surface and the fair-faced red-brick structure side by side.

Reasoning that "holds up under scrutiny" is exactly what draws Ling to restoration. "Right after I finished my undergraduate degree I spent two years building new houses," he says. "Later I realized that in that process, to satisfy all sorts of demands from all sorts of parties, a building can end up with no logic at all." Four years after graduating from the architecture department at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, he went back to school at Tongji University to study architectural history and theory.

It was there that Ling met his advisor, Lu Yongyi, who would go on to shape him deeply. A professor at Tongji, Lu specializes in the history of Western architecture and in the protection of historic buildings; she was one of the designers on the design and restoration of Tongli Wuzhen.

"Professor Lu opened up a fascinating picture of historic buildings for me," Ling says. "There's discovery in it, there's surprise in it, and there's creation in it — and the creation rests on science."

The creativity restoration demands usually comes from an architect's experience and from informed guesswork and imagination about history. That comes up often: these buildings are old, and however hard a team searches the archives, it cannot always find every document about the thing it is restoring.

Take this project. Ling and his colleagues found a building drawing by Atkinson & Dallas. But neither the elevation nor the section matched the actual dimensions well. Ling concluded that it was probably not a construction drawing or an as-built drawing, but a design proposal.

In an age without computers or CAD software, measurement was less precise than it is now. Turning a drawing into a building always produced error; how much error, and what the finished thing looked like, depended on the workers' skill and on the materials and conditions of the day, and carried a fair amount of chance. So even after the architects worked out the volumes of the four roof faces from the roofline they had reconstructed from old photographs, no matter how they drew it they could not reproduce what the photographs showed, or the single horizontal ridge line in the proposal drawing.

For this, the team made detailed guesses and argued them through, laying out the whole chain of reasoning step by step for the Shanghai municipal expert committee. Drawing on the experience of scholars and engineers, the architects kept adjusting their geometric model, then went on site with the construction crew to imagine and simulate the steps the original workers would have followed. Only then did they arrive at what is now considered a ridge framework very close to the original.

"I've hit this exact problem before. It was the same when I restored the British Consulate at the Bund Source," Ling says. "If you restore the roof to strict dimensions, there is no way to build that roofline. The workers back then corrected it by hand as they went, which is why the building ends up looking right — but it isn't actually a straight line. So restoration of this kind can only be described as work shaped by the designer's experience and logical judgment."

Enter now from North Suzhou Road and walk through the gatehouse of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, its facade torn down and rebuilt, and you can still see Cultural Revolution slogans painted on the inner walls of the archway — "the proletariat," "long live." This is a "slice of history" that the restoration team argued over at length and then deliberately kept.

Walking inward along the wall — a stretch of washed-stone, a stretch of fair-faced red brick — the path is paved in gray-blue stone brick. On the other side, construction workers have already built flowerbeds of various sizes, to be planted later with landscaping.

The building sits at the end of that path, with the Bulgari Hotel and hotel residences behind it, their exteriors designed by Foster + Partners. Its facade is largely finished: the dark red window frames, once missing a panel here and a panel there, have all been replaced with brown wooden louvered shutters; the fair-faced red brickwork is pointed with the "ingot" joint characteristic of the period; and a neat "ingot" balustrade runs around the four sloped roof faces.

Inside, scaffolding still fills much of the space. A carved wooden staircase links the first and second floors. Ling points at it: "This staircase collapsed at one point — it wasn't properly protected during construction, the roof leaked in the plum-rain season, and we nearly couldn't put it back together." The floors and roofs of the grand hall and the second floor are still being worked on. In the best case, the architect says, the whole restoration could be finished soon.

The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce is the longest job Ling has ever worked on. It has not been a profitable one.

"The design fee we got barely covers the cost, let alone recoups it. We can only subsidize this one with other projects," Ling says. Shanghai Lianchuang Architectural Design, the parent of the Urban Regeneration team, is under pressure to go public. Head office's verdict on the historic-restoration business is simple: "It doesn't make money."

"But what we do can't be measured only by how much wealth it creates," Ling says.

An unstable team is another headache. Since 2010, more than 100 architects and engineers have passed through the Chamber of Commerce project under him — hired, departed, still on staff. Sixty have left; about 40 remain.

On that point Ling admits: "Without a feeling for historic buildings, it's very hard to stay in this job." He has a joke of his own: "Every great project comes with a pile of grubby compromises."

It isn't that Ling doesn't want to make money — after all, "a designer has to protect his own quality of life, and get to do the work he loves." He hopes the business can support him and the designers under him, so that he could eventually "let go and run an NGO" — something that needs no investment and pays for itself.

He just hasn't found a business model he likes.

For now, Ling's idea is to turn his historic-restoration company into a content platform — not only restoring buildings, but taking the cultural stories dug up along the way and making salable products out of them, whether exhibitions, merchandise or IP. His office is stacked with construction records and archival research on old Shanghai buildings: the Chamber of Commerce, the Jardine Matheson packing warehouse, Xinchang and Chuansha old towns in the city's outskirts. How to turn all that into commercial value that can pay for his restoration projects is something he still hasn't settled.

Still, Ling isn't pessimistic. His company is restoring one building after another, and work is not hard to find.

"I've always been an optimist," he says. "Especially now that people can see culture and history add commercial value, more and more businesspeople are starting to talk about urban renewal. That makes me happy. What grows old will grow old, and new historic buildings will keep appearing. Something always disappears along the way; the turnover is unavoidable."

Cover image provided by Lianchuang Design. Uncredited images were taken by the reporter.