The Shanghai Grand Opera House, a contemporary architectural wonder and new city landmark, is preparing to face the public.
Six years in the making, since it broke ground on Dec 18, 2019, the 146,000-square-meter complex, sitting on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River beside the Shanghai Expo Culture Park, houses three main performance venues with a combined 4,200 seats. It stands as one of Shanghai's most ambitious cultural projects and "the final piece in the city's theatrical ecosystem", says Zhang Xiaoding, general manager of Shanghai Grand Opera House Management Co.
Of the three theaters in the complex, the largest is Harmony Hall with 2,000 seats. It is designed for opera, ballet and symphonic performances. It boasts one of the largest theater stages in Asia at 3,500 sq m and enables rapid scene changes, allowing up to three or four different productions in a single week.
Then there is the Soar Theatre, with 1,200 seats, tailored for experimental and original theater, music and dance productions.
The smallest of the three, the Open Stage, is defined by a 13-meter glass wall overlooking the park. It is a flexible space that supports immersive theater and chamber music.
The new opera house "filled the last blank in the cluster of theaters in Pudong", Zhang says. With its launch, "theaters on both sides of the Huangpu River will form a complete ecosystem. In the future, they will each have their distinctive function and positioning, complementing each other".
In terms of operating scale or its overall size, the Shanghai Grand Opera House will be the "highest-standard, top-quality theater in Shanghai", she says.
Even before its completion, the opera house had become famous for its grand double-helical staircase that spirals up from ground level to the roof, forming a 10,000-sq-m public terrace.
From this vantage point, visitors can take in panoramic views of the river, the park and the city skyline.
Spanning 30 meters at its widest, the staircase is the building's visual heart, giving it the look of a huge, unfolding Chinese fan.
"We didn't start by saying we'll design an opera house like a fan," says Robert Greenwood, partner of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta, who designed the opera house, in a video clip. "We started with the idea and belief that this building should be about movement.
"The fan came from the concept of movement. What's interesting about the concept of movement is that it's so embedded in the theater, the opera, the dance, the performance. We move on the stage in time and space. It's also embedded in this space."
Cui Zhongfang, chief architect of the East China Architectural Design & Research Institute and design principal of the Shanghai Grand Opera House, describes the design team as "a consortium of four parties" and says the institute's role is to coordinate all the disciplines and let each one play to its strengths.
Han Xu, deputy manager of the project from Shanghai Construction No 4 (Group) Co, sees the staircase as a dancer twirling the hem of her skirt in a spinning movement. Yet, to realize such a form of lightweight grace, he tells the media, required pushing the limits of construction technology.
The spiraling staircase combines long spans, extreme cantilevers and ultra-thin structural elements.
"A typical balcony cantilever might extend one or two meters. Ours reaches 30 meters from the central column," he says.
To achieve the fan's seamless, lightweight curved structure, the team deployed 165 MPa ultra-high-performance concrete as the primary load-bearing material — the first large-scale application of its kind in building construction in China. Four times stronger than standard residential concrete and twice as strong as that used in the Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China, the concrete had previously been limited to small-scale use in bridge decks.
From 2021 to 2023, a dedicated task force spent two years tackling material performance, composition, and installation challenges. "We had two full-length beam cantilevers built for a full-scale destructive test at Tongji University," Han says. "We also had digital algorithms developed to translate the free-form geometry into nearly 30,000 precisely coordinated points, automatically generating close to 300 detailed drawings."
The core structure was topped out in July 2023.
These breakthroughs earned global recognition. In 2025, the American Concrete Institute honored the project with a merit award for mid-to-high-rise structures — the first time a Chinese mainland project received the distinction. More recently, the International Federation for Structural Concrete honored the giant spiral staircase with its 2026 award for outstanding concrete structures, a top-tier global honor presented once every four years and never before won by a Chinese project. "It is like winning an
Oscar award or an Olympic medal," Han says.
"In ancient China, the literati used fans as carriers of landscape, poetry and art," says Cui, the design principal. "We have created a blank fan surface, inviting future generations to inscribe their own creations."
Meanwhile, the opera house is designed not just for ticketed audiences, but for all, says Gong Cheng, studio director, China, at Snohetta. The transparent lobby welcomes natural light and offers unobstructed views of the park and beyond.
"We wanted to create a space that feels owned by everyone in Shanghai, and every visitor. You can take a walk, ride a bike, bring your kids, go on a date — all of that can happen here at the opera house," he says.
