Day 11 -- This morning we all loaded up into the van and headed over to visit SWA Group’s firm, which opened in Shanghai EXTREMELY recently. It was interesting seeing this office still getting its feet on the ground and settling in. SWA Group has offices in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a few other places. Most of the currently 20 office employees in Shanghai have only just arrived within the past couple of weeks from a variety of the U.S. offices, as well as several new employees locally. As a firm, they have been working on projects in China for the last 10 years and it made sense to open an office here to have better connection to the sites, clients, and time difference.
We were met by Pamela Conrad, a transfer from the L.A. office, who gave us a tour of the recently expanded office. To describe this office in two words, bright and spacious. We walked in and were greeted by a bright red accent wall in the reception area and lime green floors. Once again, we were very excited to see the spacious Western-style studio with lots of trace and layers of it on people’s desks.
After giving us a brief presentation of some of the projects that SWA was working on here in China, some of the professionals told us more about the firm, working in China, and some tips for getting internships and jobs.
Leaving SWA, the van took us to the Suzhou Creek Art galleries, a renovated, industrial neighborhood that had sprung up with new studio spaces as a small artist block. We wandered throughout the exhibits for an hour or so, looking at artists whose names seemed both local as well as foreign.
There were a few highlight exhibits for me, one being a series of portraits of traditional Chinese Theatre masks, painted faces, and modern icons that were done in a very bold almost plastic-looking black, white, and red colors. Within faces though, one noticed that the artist had drawn thousands of little figures all connected, forming the shadows and contours of the face. Another was a multimedia collaborative exhibit titled “Omen.”
The artists incorporated all sorts of media, from rice paper cuttings to painting to antique vanity mirrors with LED lights to create figures or write words from behind the artwork. It was also amusing that several food-for-thoughts were scattered intermittently throughout the exhibit such as one pointing to a telephone number and saying, “Call if you are French” and one giving the sage advice that “If you take the square root of your age and divide it by the area of the room, then read aloud in a thick Scottish accent you shall have the answer to all your problems.”
We reconvened and headed to lunch at a restaurant called elementfresh. A very L.A. style restaurant with sandwiches, smoothies, salads, soups etc. all made with fresh produce. It was delicious, enough said.
This afternoon we visited the Shanghai World Financial Center, the world’s highest building (when it comes to occupiable floors). First off, this building is HUGE. Its one of those buildings where you look up and you get a crick in your neck trying to discern where the actual top of the building is located. We walked in and got our tickets for the observatory and were ushered through this reflective LED hallway (this building is very new, completed in 2008.) There was a series of informative displays about the building and Shanghai’s development, including an awesome model of the Huang Pu riverfront. The detail was absolutely insane with all the building’s windows and patterns depicted. Not only that, the model cycled through the day and night showing the lights go on and off through the day, with an LCD screen as a background showing the sky. They also had a graphic showing the growth of NYC, Shanghai, and Tokyo by watching in section how the buildings sprang up over time. It was insane: New York grew taller at a fairly steady pace, Tokyo also fairly steady with several huge spikes, but Shanghai appeared out of nowhere within the past twenty years or so. It's truly amazing. The rate that projects go up and get turned around into construction is crazy here. If China is still classified as a developing country it certainly is developing FAST.
An elevator guide ushered us into the elevator that would take us up to the observatory. It was like we stepped into Willy Wonka’s magical elevator, for as we passed each floor LED lights along the sides of the elevator, along with a circular screen showed our speed as we flew up to the 97th floor. On the skywalk we got some amazing views over the city. It almost was surreal, like we were looking at a model, not the actual skyline. Unfortunately today was a super smoggy overcast sort of day so we could barely see across the river. Still the height of this building is shocking, even more so the fact that the Shanghai tower across the block is going to be even taller and judging the rate of construction here, probably going to be completed very soon. From the skywalk we went up to the observatory on the 100th floor, which had glass peepholes out of the tower as well as glass walls and mirrored ceilings to provide views all over the city. It was extremely bright today, so sunglasses were a definite must up here.
Our van picked us up and drove us to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo site, where we walked around the Houtan Wetland Park, a riverfront revitalization designed by Turenscape, which improved the quality of the polluted Huang Pu River water through a series of terraced wetlands which cleaned the water to a non-potable state. This water saved the World Expo an equivalent of $500,000 in water treatment expenses, for approximately 500,000 gallons of water were treated and reused throughout the Expo site for non-potable uses.
The park was extremely peaceful; there were very few users when we wandered in, a great contrast to what it must have been like when it was servicing vast pedestrian movement during the Expo. Originally a steel factory, then a shipping yard, and later a landfill, this Turenscape incorporated some of the remaining industrial structures into the design, framing views of the Shanghai skyline and wetland park along a boardwalk surrounded by a great variety of wetland plants. We took a few hours just to wander around the giant loop that goes around the park.
Dinner tonight was at Hot Pot King! We’ve been spoiled eating several Western meals the past couple of days, so our chopsticks skills were not as up to par as they probably could have been. While our last hot pot meal was very traditional and authentic, the electric stoves built into the table heated our two different types of cooking water, one filled with tomatoes and cucumbers, and the other chilis and other spicy oils. Everyone got to go through a buffet of different Chinese sauce ingredients and concoct their own dipping sauce, a bit of a daunting task, but I think everyone’s mixtures were good. We ordered our ingredients and had about five to a hotpot trying different combinations of cooking water or sauces. It was a great meal, only made better by a visit to the ShenShen bakery next door to the restaurant for dessert.
Long day, but lots of fun!
-- Anne Hundley
