PUJIAN ARCADES COMMUNITY RETAIL CONCEPT

Design: JSA Architects
Location: Pudong District, Shanghai, China
Project Type: Adaptive Reuse
Project Year: 2013

Design Process

JSA’s design objective for this project was to establish a human-scaled shopping and leisure environment, that would serve as a retreat from the over-scaled infrastructure, heavy traffic, parking lots, big box retail and advertising that dominated the project’s surroundings.

Strip existing facade clean but maintain general building massing.

Selectively demolish, creating a more intimately scaled blocks of alleys, courtyards and arcades.

Wrap with a staggered edge on ground and wall planes, increasing block porosity and a sense of human scale.

Blend roof and ground planes with landscape, creating useable community space as well as a visual focus for surrounding buildings.

We also wanted to promote a more laid-back, community atmosphere instead of the aggressive commercial environment often seen in new Chinese shopping centers. So instead of ultra-modern or showy form-making, we proposed a generous landscape and a more subdued architecture of thoughtful restraint and natural material.

Original Site Condition

The atmosphere of the existing site is dominated by the extra-wide roads and super-blocks typical of Shanghai’s Pudong district, as well as the commercial monotony of big box retail and podium developments. Within the block, however, there are hints of opportunity for a more human-scaled, community type of space.