Bank of Shanghainese Architecture: A Repository for the City's Vanishing Identity

What happens when a city's growth outpaces its memory? Shanghai, one of the fastest-evolving metropolises on the planet, is losing something no skyline can replace: its local vitality, its dialect, and the architectural typologies that once gave its neighborhoods a legible, lived-in character. The Bank of Shanghainese Architecture responds to that crisis not with nostalgia but with infrastructure. It proposes an institution, part archive, part exhibition hall, part urban catalyst, that treats cultural heritage as a resource to be actively managed rather than passively mourned.

Designed by Ruijun Li and Jishi Pan, the project is a winning entry in the Di - Generic Cities: Shanghai competition. The brief asked participants to confront the homogenization of Shanghai's built environment, and Li and Pan answer with a strategy rooted in adaptive urban regeneration: modular architectural interventions that sustain historical influences while embracing contemporary city planning methodologies. The result is a cluster of pavilions that blend traditional Shanghainese building typologies with spaces for cultural exchange, interactive exhibitions, and educational programs focused on the city's evolving architectural language.

A Cluster of Pavilions Against the Monochrome Grid

The aerial axonometric immediately communicates the project's urban argument. A cluster of patterned, textured pavilions sits within a monochrome context of generic city blocks, asserting its difference through formal variety and material richness rather than through sheer scale. The surrounding fabric reads as neutral, almost mute; the Bank reads as specific, loaded with the vocabulary of Shanghainese construction. The accompanying diagram unpacks where that vocabulary comes from. A central circular collage aggregates housing typologies drawn from across the city's history, while scattered isometric studies of roofs and facades catalog the formal elements available for reuse. It functions as an architectural taxonomy, mapping the genetic code of Shanghai's vernacular before translating it into new spatial configurations.

The Tiled Section: Heritage on Display, Not Under Glass

A sectional drawing reveals the project's attitude toward preservation: it is tactile, immersive, and public. A sweeping curved wall clad in green and white tiles wraps through the building, creating a backdrop for multilevel circulation where visitors encounter heritage on every landing. The tiles are not decorative appliqué; they reference the material palette of traditional Shanghainese construction, functioning as both structural expression and cultural signal. Visitors move across open walkways and terraces, engaging with the wall as a continuous surface rather than a sealed exhibit.

The interior perspective deepens this reading. Multilevel gallery spaces house display cases, art collections, and archival material, but the architecture refuses the white-box gallery model. Figures browse freely across split levels and mezzanines, and the spatial sequence feels more like navigating a neighborhood than walking through a museum. This is architectural storytelling made spatial: the building's own structure teaches visitors about the typologies it catalogues.

Red Gabled Volumes and the Public Ground

At street level, the project meets the city with a series of red gabled volumes arranged along a generous public plaza. Pedestrians and cyclists occupy the foreground, confirming that the Bank is conceived as an open urban amenity rather than a gated cultural monument. The gabled profiles recall the pitched roofs of traditional Shanghainese lane houses, scaled and serialized into a rhythm that feels simultaneously familiar and new. Color does important work here: the red volumes mark the institution's presence in the streetscape without relying on signage or spectacle.

Circular Courtyard as Organizing Heart

The site plan reveals the project's spatial logic. A central circular courtyard anchors the composition, surrounded by irregular pavilion footprints and planted courtyards that create a porous ground plane. The geometry is deliberate: the circle gathers, the irregular edges disperse. Visitors can move through a network of outdoor rooms before entering any building, and the planted courtyards soften the boundary between architecture and landscape. This inclusive urban strategy ensures that cultural programming extends beyond interior galleries into the open air, inviting community engagement at every threshold.

Why This Project Matters

The competition brief asked designers to reckon with the "generic city," a concept Rem Koolhaas articulated decades ago that has only accelerated since. Li and Pan do not reject modernity or retreat into historicism. Instead, they propose a working institution, a bank in the truest sense, that deposits, catalogs, and circulates the cultural DNA of Shanghai's built environment. The modular pavilion strategy is scalable, the typological research is transferable, and the public ground plane ensures that the project serves as civic infrastructure, not just a cultural set piece.

What sets the Bank of Shanghainese Architecture apart from typical heritage proposals is its refusal to treat the past as fragile. Tiles, gables, courtyards, and lane-house proportions are not preserved behind rope lines; they are redeployed as active ingredients in a contemporary urban framework. The project argues, convincingly, that a city's architectural identity is not a fixed artifact but a living resource, one that requires institutional care, public access, and the confidence to keep building with it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ruijun Li, Jishi Pan

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Project credits: Bank of Shanghainese by Ruijun Li, Jishi Pan Di - Generic Cities: Shanghai (uni.xyz).