Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees blooms in Shanghai
Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees is Shanghai’s newest mixed-use development, blending trees, art and sculptural concrete
The first phase of Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees has finally opened in Shanghai, unsurprisingly a couple of years behind schedule (thanks to the pandemic) but as verdant and striking as the name and early renders suggested. The mixed-use development takes up just part of a 15-acre site bounded to the north by Suzhou Creek and by the M50 art district to the south. From the river, the building is deliberately hard to read, a 60m tall, gently sloping, terraced jumble of horizontally striped stone and towering planters in unapologetically raw and rippled concrete.
For studio founder and head Thomas Heatherwick, 1000 Trees reimagines large-scale urban developments as open, social spaces rather than blank monolithic boxes or towers. ‘Many big buildings just feel cold, sterile and monotonous on the outside,’ he says, ‘so our challenge was to create something engaging on a human scale.’
1000 Trees: the first phase
Based around a 9m grid, the building twists 45 degrees to get maximum river views. The studio’s biggest idea, though, was leaving the development’s giant supporting columns on the outside and turning them into those planted podiums, exposed sections of cliff topped with trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers and climbers. The exoskeleton device allows for more open and lighter space inside but also means, says Heatherwick, that shops, restaurants, galleries, even a kindergarten all have outdoor terraces. The building is also deliberately porous, and accessible from multiple angles with walkways at various levels. Heatherwick likens it to a termite mound.
‘We felt an enormous responsibility to make sure that commerce not be its only atmosphere and to make a community heart,’ he says, ‘that it has a diversity of places to explore and is somewhere that people can just be.’ (The design was, of course, plotted long before the Covid-19 pandemic – Heatherwick nods to the influence of Jan Gehl, the Danish architect, urbanist and author of Life Between Buildings and Public Spaces, Public Life – but that provision of outdoor space now looks beyond prescient.)
1000 Trees, though, has also become a lightning rod for a lively debate in the architectural press about the positives and not-so-positives of ‘urban greening’. Those for verdant buildings argue that their plants and trees increase biodiversity, lower temperatures, suck in CO2 and other pollutants, reduce noise and generally lift the spirits. Critics argue that those benefits are far outweighed by the carbon output of building in concrete and steel, and that maintaining green walls and roofs is resource intensive, though living walls are far more at fault here. Heatherwick Studio says the planting on 1000 Trees is all local, will change with the seasons and has been carefully researched and picked to minimise pruning and maintenance.
Heatherwick and Lisa Finlay, the studio’s group lead on the 1000 Trees project, say another key priority was engaging with the low-level reused warehouses and industrial buildings of the M50 art district on the other side of the development. ‘The planning regulations clearly expected us to build a huge tower on a podium, but that would have made a mockery of the art district,’ says Heatherwick. ‘The most respectful thing we could do was to come to meet it at street level and at its scale, to blur that boundary as much as we could.’
The much less discussed south-facing façade, then, is essentially an angled display space for local art especially commissioned for the building by French street artist and M50 champion Paul Dezio. Local artists have also been invited to create 40m-high murals inside the building’s elevator shafts, visible from glass cars. Heatherwick says the artwork is ‘an acknowledgement that no one designer should be allowed to do projects this big. They need to be diverse. Single brains will create something that is too much of one thing.’
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
An external glass lift, meanwhile, is housed in a tower of weathered Cor-ten steel blades, a shimmery echo and reimagining (and repositioning) of part of a flour mill that once stood on the site. ‘The city said they wanted to remember that there was a mill there and asked us to rebuild its tower,’ explains Heatherwick. ‘Initially, everyone said “No, we can’t do that. It’s kitsch, it’s ridiculous.” But then we thought, this is an enormous project, the more idiosyncrasy the better, so how do we keep this memory but make it useful?’
For Heatherwick, the steel tower exemplifies the studio’s mission to build the strange and unexpected into its large-scale developments. ‘I deeply believe in not copying the past but I'm really proud of the tower. We're really interested in how we build, in what typically gets eradicated, and not creating sterile dead places. Everyone loves clean lines but clean lines are actually boring. So how do you get dirty lines?’ The entire 1000 Trees plot is bisected by a road, and phase two of the development, another forested urban mountain but this one 100m tall, is now under construction. The new development, which has to work its way around four existing heritage buildings, will include workspace, a cinema, a hotel, as well as a large park and an amphitheatre.
Finlay says the team will now be studying how people use phase one of the development, alert to the fact that the pandemic has permanently shifted behaviour and needs in dense urban areas. ‘We want to do a lot of monitoring over the next year,’ says Finlay, ‘and look at how the terraces and spaces are actually being used. It might be used in completely different ways to what we imagined, so let’s find out.’
INFORMATION
-
Postcard from Paris Design Week 2024
Surrealism, restraint and a beautiful show of Blunk marked the new season of design events in the French capital
By Dan Thawley Published
-
Hermès cuts a dash with its first sports watch for women
The Hermès Cut epitomises the clean design codes of the house
By Hannah Silver Published
-
First look: ‘Ash Rise’ – 20 Scottish designers explore the versatility of the blighted native hardwood
A new Edinburgh exhibition addresses the issue of ash dieback with an inventive and optimistic response from Scotland’s design community
By Alyn Griffiths Published
-
Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2024: meet the practices
In the Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2024, our latest guide to exciting, emerging practices from around the world, 20 young studios show off their projects and passion
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
Tsing-Tien Making's approach is rooted in its 'passion' for architecture
Tsing-Tien Making, a young Chinese practice, joins the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2024
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
Fotografiska Shanghai invites us to 'a poetic immersion' into the realm of photography
Fotografiska Shanghai by AIM Architecture opens nestled into a green corner of the Chinese city's Suzhou Creek
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
A Chinese community hall brings contemporary minimalism to its historical site
A new Chinese community hall in Wanghu Village, designed by UAD, effortlessly blends old and new in minimalist architecture
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
Gong House is a contemporary Chinese home drawing on its spectacular countryside context
Gong House by Shenzhen-based Various Associates is a modern family home nestled in the Chinese countryside
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
The ZGC International Innovation Center in Beijing is a futuristic addition to China's own 'Silicon Valley'
The ZGC International Innovation Center by MAD Architects completes, revealing a new hub for technology and modern ideas that co-exists with its surroundings
By Tianna Williams Published
-
Emerald Screen Pergola brings wonder and intrigue to an everyday setting in China
Designed by Wutopia Lab, Emerald Screen Pergola is a pavilion designed to inject ‘magical realism’ into the everyday, nodding to ancient Chinese practices
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
Architectural gardens around the world to soothe the soul
From small domestic gardens, to nature reserves, urban interventions and local parks, here are some of the finest green projects that place nature at their heart
By Ellie Stathaki Published