By Maya (smartshanghai.com)
Updated: 2007-10-24 09:45

Recent and ongoing development within Shanghai's Bund area suggests that the city's most famous district is growing into a more heterogeneous and multifaceted destination for art, culture and nightlife. 'Reintroducing the Bund' is a series of articles examining Shanghai's Bund district as a evolving and changing 'neighbourhood in waiting.'

Today's Bund Art Deco architecture has either already been renovated to emit modern ideals, or left to bite the dust of its erstwhile glories. Long ignored due to placements off the main strip, and only regaining the attention (and facility according to government sanctions) to be renovated a few years ago, much of Shanghai's Art Deco heritage has been lying in wait of recent developments, quietly pining for formerly glamorous times.

"Shanghai has more Art Deco buildings than any other city in the world," says international photographer and Art Deco obsessive Deke Erh; and most of them can be credited to one man: Sir Victor Sassoon. In the 1920s and 30s, Sassoon was the embodiment of the Shanghai Bund lifestyle. Glamorous and over the top even by today's standards, Sassoon was a British Iraqi-Jew who became a tycoon in China via the drug and weapons trade (sort of like the 'teaching English' expat career of the time period). Despite his ignoble beginnings, Sir Victor must be credited with commissioning some of the Bund's (and Shanghai's) most beautiful and lasting Art Deco masterpieces: Hamilton House, the Hotel Metropole, and the Cathay (or "Peace") Hotel. These three are undergoing radical reconstruction in the next few years, and it is my bet that the trend inaugurates a long-awaited renaissance of classic architectural focus in Shanghai, in the face of blatant (post) modernism across the creek.

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