Where To Rub Elbows With The Elite Of Architecture In Shanghai

14 January 2013

 

Shanghai’s skyline has stirred the imagination of outsiders since the city’s rise as an international trading hub a century and a half ago. Prior to its Communist “liberation” in 1949, Shanghai attracted architects such as Slovak Laszlo Hudec, whose Park Hotel built in 1934 and villas are part of a prolific record that still awes tourists today.  American John Portman arrived at the start of the country’s reform era in the 1980s to build the landmark the city’s Portman Center, which relaunched contemporary design in China’s largest city.

Two decades after the Portman Center was finished, China’s energetic international business hub more than ever summons the world’s best architects and their firms to create creative structures of all sizes with funding by the government and, increasingly, the by new rich. Among them, Gensler today is working on the 140-story, government-owned Shanghai Tower, which will be country’s tallest building when completed; Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates designed the nearby 100+ storey Japan-backed Shanghai International Financial Center, and Skidmore, Owing & Merrill did the 95-storey Jin Mao Tower, which for a time boasted the world’s highest hotel check-in counter and which for more than a decade was also China’s tallest building. Just today, DreamWorks Animation of the U.S. and government partners unveiled plans for a $3 billion entertainment complex in Shanghai that seeks to create the “Broadway” of China.

 After the end of their frequently long days, where do the city’s elite of building design gather to relax and chat? Many, whether they live in Shanghai or are just visiting town, check in at a richly designed and understated pub run by one of their own, Ben Wood.

 Set in a narrow alley in the iconic Xintiandi restaurant the dining and entertainment complex that he helped to design, you could walk right by Wood’s “DRbar” while blinking your eyes or looking too long at any of the visitors from around the world that flow by. What the DRbar lacks in size and flash, it makes up for the freshness of its business intelligence, depth of its discourse and relax spirit. On any given evening, you can walk in and join a conversation with movers and shakers from the teeming city’s architecture and real estate business. And like the Xintiandi area that surrounds it, the DRbar’s design bears an usually rich story of Chinese culture. Rotund, bearded Wood, a U.S. former Air Force fighter pilot from the state of Georgia who bears a striking resemblance to writer Ernest Hemmingway, is often on hand to serve up savvy humor and details about the bar’s design, along with its potent cocktails.

 “It’s the atmosphere” that makes the DRbar different from other spots in Shanghai, said Texan Eugene Lee from his bar stood one evening in June while in Shanghai on a trip to recruit Chinese investors for property back home. “There are architects, financiers, expats and local people. It’s a crossroads without a narrow demographic,” said Lee, who visits when he is in town every three months.

 Wood himself had something a new milestone to celebrate just today.  His firm, Studio Shanghai, is the main architect for the $3 billion ”Dream City” entertainment complex in Shanghai unveiled this morning whose backers include DreamWorks Animation. The company’s CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was on hand for a press conference in the city. (See related story here.) In an interview afterward, Katzenberg lauded Wood as “incredible.”  (See interview here.)

 The DRbar’s roots trace to Harvard Square in Massachusetts, where a fresh-out-of-MIT Wood in 1983 started his career as an architect working for Ben Thompson, then of Harvard’s architecture department. Thompson’s most famous work predated Wood’s arrival: He transformed an historic area around Boston’s former city hall into the commercially thriving Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The spot for decades has since become is a popular icon on  par with Fenway Park, home of Boston’s beloved Red Sox baseball team.

 Yet Thompson has another legacy. The famously multi-faceted thinker opened a pioneering retail store called Design Research in 1953, which highlighted his interest in Scandinavian furniture and culture. Its history is chronicled in a book co-authored by Thompson’s wife, Jane, “Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes.”  Thompson was a better at creativity than business, however; the operation was eventually sold to Crate and Barrel.

 Wood, meanwhile, nearing the end of more than of nearly two decades of close collaboration with Thompson and, later, Jane, arrived in Shanghai in 1998 to work on a project very much like Faneuil Hall itself: Xintiandi. China was coming back into its own in the 1980s and 1990s as its economic reforms gathered steam and growth took off. Shanghai, “the head of the dragon” at the mouth of the Yangtze River that led to the rich inland provinces, was by the 1990s once again leading the charge and becoming a magnet for businesses, designers and romantic adventures from around the world.

 Xintiandi broke new ground in Chinese architecture in its time. At that time in the 1990s, developers with centrally located property in Shanghai usually would tear down existing sites and replace them high-rise apartment buildings that would sell quickly. Xintiandi’s Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo instead embraced Wood’s idea of preserving old buildings or reusing their original bricks and tiles on his site in the city’s Luwan area as the centerpiece of a renewal project that at its core would have much of the spirit of Thompson’s Faneuil Hall.

 Lo, who had obtained Luwan site through a lease, inherited structures that had been built in the 1930s as residential dwellings for upper middle class Shanghai doctors, lawyers and pharmacists. I lived in near that Luwan area myself for a time in 1997 before Wood appeared, and remember how dilapidated and crammed it had become.

Having set up shop in Luwan to work on Xintiandi, Wood found that the city lacked a shortage of bars.  As with many foreign-Sino businesses that work out well in China, he found himself a good partner – Francis Yum, a Hong Kong designer and building who had worked on other restaurants in Xintiandi. The name “DR” is a bow to Wood’s Harvard mentor, Thompson, and his Design Resources store. “I guess he (Thompson) had more energy than me or something, because he was able to start what is now part of a great chain. I managed to create a successful little bar and haven’t taken it any further than that.”

Wood says his created the DRbar with the dream that it will outlast him. One model he had in mind a bar throughout is construction was the 70-year-old “American Bar” in Vienna, designed by Adolf Loos. “Loos was on the cutting edge of taking art deco to the next level,” Wood enthused during an interview inside of the DRbar.  “When I was designing this bar, I couldn’t take my mind off of the American Bar. It is one of the places that if you take one piece off, you’d ruin it. Some things become classics the day they open. This place (American Bar) is one of those, because it has a timeless quality about it. I hope the DRbar will be here 50 years from now, like the American Bar.”

As Thompson used Scandinavian elements to inspire his customers, Wood consciously turned to Chinese themes. “I thought I would showcase a bar where everything is made in China, except for the liquor, of course,” he chuckles briefly, then pausing to consider if the Scotch he is selling could actually be fake. “In subtle ways, I try to convey my underlying philosophy.” He says he thinks most bar owners in Xintiandi wouldn’t think the same way. “They would put something that’d say something like: ‘Tonight’s special is margaritas for $9.95,’ or something like that. I’m trying to tell people something, with the bar, my work and everything I do.”

For starters, DRbar has a color scheme that Wood thinks best reflects the essence of China: black. “To me, black is the most important color in China, more important than red, more important than yellow, which used to be reserved for the imperial dynasties. Black is something which only China does the way China does,” he says.  “You don’t discover this until you’ve been in China for a while.”

An understated anchor of the DRbar is a four-inch wide, three- foot tall and 12-foot long wall dividing the extends nearly the length of the bar made of ink stone, one of the heaviest stones in the world.   “The ink stone is one of my favorite things I discovered,” in China, Wood says. Besides the visible, three-foot tall portion of the slabs standing erect in the bar for patrons to lean on, a half a meter of slab is dug into the ground below.

Slabs so wide – the DRbar’s is actually six thin slabs, flushed together — are rare in China today, Wood says. Usually, they are sliced into small pieces “no bigger than a Galaxy notebook,” and sold to calligraphers with a circular cup carved inside for black ink. “You can feel it, and tell its stone,” as opposed to manufactured veneer, Wood says of his wall. “You can feel the density.”

When used with ink, ink stone has to be dense enough not to absorb the ink. Over the years, however, even ink stone has several shares of black stains from ink left behind by calligraphers.  For Wood, those different shades of black symbolically reflect the different characteristics of China society.

There are other shades and images of black in the bar. The ceiling of the bar is covered with very think shoe leather that is thick enough to use to make soles in shoes. It comes from a factory in Guangzhou, China’s – and the world’s – shoe manufacturing hub.   There is also a black and white photo on the wall by Shanghai film maker and artist Yang Zedong. Yang, whose most famous film is “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest,” shoots short films in black and white and then makes black-and-wife stills from the images that he sells for as much as $50,000 each as limited editions.   “International Hotel No. 2,” the photo on the wall of the DRbar, was shot in an unused pool inside of a building from the 1930s near the Bund. A sultry model is dressed in 1930s style clothes with a cigarette tucked above her ear.

Not everything in the DRbar is black. The bar itself is cover with a mesh produced from Tibetan silver – a 50% copper, 50% silver mix that was made in Lijiang in western China’s Yunnan Province.“Francis and I were in Lijiang, and we went to this little shop and they were selling flashlights, and the handle of the flashlight was wrapped with it,” recalls Wood. “The lady there actually made it. It took months, but we eventually got this bigger piece. You’ll never see this material like this anywhere else in the world.”  On the mess on night recently sat a cricket jar about the size of an ash tray. In days past, Shanghai denizens enjoyed gambling on fights among them. “They’re beautiful pottery made from black clay. Some of them are really ornate, which I don’t like, but this one in particular is very simple. It’s beautifully made, and it was considered a household item if you collect crickets.”

The DRbar’s north wall is gray: it’s made from stacks of 4,000 tiles collected from the roof of the residences from the 1930s originally built where Xintiandi today stands. “I saw them one day stacked up, like firewood,” on Xintiandi’s construction site, and “thought they would make a beautiful wall. It clicked just like there.  They are the original tiles,” Wood recalls.

Not everything in the DRbar is old and Chinese. Hanging from the ceiling in one corner is a pedal car for children, made by automaker Morgan from the UK. Wood last year became a distributor for the luxury brand sports car, and is selling its handcrafted, regular sports cars by special order at more than $100,000 each. “Morgan isn’t a really a car. It’s a work of art,” he says, because of the crafting. Starting in August, he will open a showroom, and expects to the style to appeal to customers that want to be noticed for their taste. “People will say, ‘Who’s the guy driving that Morgan?’ They will be more interested in the guy driving the car than the car itself.”

Wood expects to make little if any money from selling only a handful of cars. Yet he doesn’t care much about the profits from the stylish, well-crafted bar, either, and uses the example of the the Dymaxion car designed by American architect Buckminister Fuller in the 1930s to explain why. The provocatively designed vehicle didn’t succeed commercially but broke new ground conceptually.

“Many people said to me after I built three of these cars, ‘I’m sorry your car wasn’t a success,’” Fuller wrote years later. “And I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ They’d say, ‘Well you didn’t get it into production.’ I said, ‘I wasn’t going into business,’ I was producing a vehicle. And it was extremely successful. I learned an incredible amount. ”