Shanghai Prototype : Living Between Markets and Data Center

Advisors: Ryan McCaffrey Jacqueline Shaw • Thesis Project

Rhode Island School of Design • 2020

Shanghai Prototype situates itself in China’s largest city, Shanghai. I examine Shanghai’s contemporary built environment through three lenses: the Common, the Large, and the Hybrid. The Common focuses on the Shikumen style, a regional building type using brick and timber. Built by imperial colonizers in the 19th century, Shikumen compounds were first constructed by native Chinese craftsmen and sold to wealthy merchants, but their function later changed. After the Communist government gained full control of China in 1949, Shanghai was designated the economic center of the state. A population mobilized by economic opportunities, demand for labor, and a chance to participate in modernization rapidly densified the city. Single-family homes were soon subdivided to accommodate multiple families, with hallways becoming a space for daily chores and social interactions. By increasing occupancy load, the Common Shikumen type home was effectively turned into social housing by the state.

In the last five decades, Shanghai’s legacy of imperial and internal colonization has perpetuated the urbanization of an economic center with a residential and infrastructural periphery. The metro system has accelerated consumerism by amplifying connectivity. Now, colonial Shikumen-style housing has become either a skeleton for globalized retail or entirely replaced by new, massive commercial buildings, i.e. the Large. Zoning laws permit dense, large-scale structures, such as shopping centers and residential towers, to be built directly adjacent to the Shikumen buildings, dwarfing the culturally significant Common, if it is not razed entirely. The commercialization and eradication of Shikumen buildings submerge both Shanghai’s colonial history and contemporary oppression.

Regional Typology Research

Design Proposal

The thesis challenges this trend by introducing a new paradigm: the Hybrid. Sited on a 15-acre zone attached to the No. 4 line’s Baoshan Road station, the Hybrid approach symbiotically merges critical infrastructure systems (the metro system and data center) with low-density residential dwellings and markets. Integrating the data center brings an often unseen service powered by the state into view. I propose large data center blocks across the grain of public thoroughfares, interrupted by housing units and intersected by parks. The large patch of low-rise structures connects to an elevated walkway feeding into the metro station. The Hybrid also imagines a new, regionally specific building type, one not reminiscent of its colonial past, but as a viable way to compress the distance between the state and the people. The collective footprint of the Hybrid programs dictates circulation paths, which embody resistance to internal colonization as they ring back to the Common as a space for the people.