Description of project by Foster + Partners
Bund Finance Centre (BFC) is a prominent new mixed-use destination in Shanghai designed jointly by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio. The 420,000-square-metre development of eight buildings includes two 180-metre landmark towers, and combines premium ‘grade A’ offices with a boutique hotel, an arts and cultural centre and a wide variety of luxury retail spaces, all arranged around a generous landscaped public plaza.
Occupying a prominent site on the Bund, the buildings define the ‘end point’ to Shanghai’s most famous street. The masterplan is highly permeable for pedestrians, with the design conceived as a point of connection between the old town, the Bund and the new financial district. Inspired by this urban context, two landmark towers are placed in the south of the site, while the buildings facing the waterfront are staggered in height and relate in scale and rhythm to the grand nineteenth-century landmarks along the Bund.
The scheme brings together premium office space for international headquarters and a unique ‘corporate mansion’ – an elite networking platform for business partners and VIPs. A boutique luxury hotel provides a glamorous new destination on the Bund. The retail spaces are vertically layered with boutiques, concept stores for international brands, a luxury shopping mall and Michelin-starred restaurants. A palette of crafted stone and bronze details gives the buildings a jewel-like quality. The edges of each volume are made of richly textured, hand-crafted granite and become slimmer as they rise, giving the impression of solidity at the base and transparency at the top.
At the heart of the scheme is a flexible arts and cultural centre, which combines exhibition and events halls with a performance venue, inspired by the open stages of traditional Chinese theatres. The centre is conceived as a platform for international arts and cultural exchange, as well as a place for brand events, product launches and corporate functions. The building is encircled by a moving veil, which adapts to the changing use of the building and reveals the stage on the balcony and views towards Pudong.
David Nelson, Head of Design at Foster + Partners.-
"The project has given us an exciting opportunity to create a glamorous new destination, as well as a new series of spaces that create a major addition to the public realm, right in the heart of historic Shanghai."
Thomas Heatherwick, Heatherwick Studio.-
"Sitting at the gateway to Shanghai’s Old Town, on the river bank where boats would arrive from the rest of the world, this is an extraordinary site which stood unoccupied for many years. In filling this last empty site on Shanghai’s famous Bund, the concept is inspired by China’s ambition not to duplicate what exists in the rest of the world but to look instead for new ways to connect with China’s phenomenal architectural and landscape heritage."
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
Thomas Heatherwick established in 1994, Heatherwick Studio recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking. Today a team of 180, including architects, designers and makers, works from a combined studio and workshop in Kings Cross, London.
At the heart of the studio’s work is a profound commitment to finding innovative design solutions, with a dedication to artistic thinking and the latent potential of materials and craftsmanship. This is achieved through a working methodology of collaborative rational inquiry, undertaken in a spirit of curiosity and experimentation.
In the twenty years of its existence, Heatherwick Studio has worked in many countries, with a wide range of commissioners and in a variety of regulatory environments. Through this experience, the studio has acquired a high level of expertise in the design and realisation of unusual projects, with a particular focus on the large scale.
The studio’s work includes a number of nationally significant projects for the UK, including the award-winning UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, the Olympic Cauldron for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and the New Bus for London.
Thomas is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects; a Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum; and has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from the Royal College of Art, University of Dundee, University of Brighton, Sheffield Hallam University and University of Manchester.
He has won the Prince Philip Designers Prize, and, in 2004, was the youngest practitioner to be appointed a Royal Designer for Industry. In 2010, Thomas was awarded the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize and the London Design Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to design.
In 2013 Thomas was awarded a CBE for his services to the design industry.
