Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai

Shanghai, China

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Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai

Shanghai, China

Firm

Paul Andreu architecte paris

Type

Cultural › Hall/Theater

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2004

SIZE

300,000 sqft - 500,000 sqft

BUDGET

$50M - 100M

Oriental Art Center
Shanghai
by Paul Andreu, February 7, 2001

What is it?

During the day, at the end of Century Avenue, opposite Town Hall, it is a building made of curves out of a pearl gray, shiny material. It resembles no other building in the city. Nothing, no sign, no writing indicates its function, which is not otherwise immediately apparent. What is it? It is some sort of enormous sculpture set amidst trees in the middle of the roads. Highlighted by reflections and shadows, its shape changes as you move around it. It soars up from the ground and opens out to the sky above. Opposite Town Hall, is an entrance with a big flight of steps leading up to it. From here, at the bottom, the building front becomes transparent and you can see inside another flight of steps and colorful high walls. Something precious and mysterious must be happening inside, something at once solemn and joyous, something set here in the middle of the city like familiar object, an object that is here for the sole beauty of the city and the pleasure of its inhabitants.
At night, the building becomes bright and transparent as if by magic. It shines like a light in the darkness. One can see all the people entering the building, moving about, climbing the stairs, spreading out in all directions around three interior volumes whose contrasting colors fade in the color of the ceiling as they rise. There is a sense of gaiety and brightness in the movements of the people, the colors and the lights. What is it? A place made for this calm, happy crowd. A place that the light opens up, and that you progressively enter, gradually approaching something important and simple, something that you love. It is, of course, a place of art, a place for exhibitions and performances. The three interior volumes that rise out of the base in which they are rooted, becoming lighter in color as they reach the ceiling, house three auditoriums. They house and protect them as one might protect a place that is precious and fragile. The common space around them, composed as a variation on the twin theme of transparency and curves, comprises an entrance lobby, lounges, the circulation space and exhibition areas. Functionally and visually, this space links the auditoriums to the city, visible from everywhere, and to the surrounding landscape, the trees and the sky above.
What is a performance space? It is the site of an encounter, meticulously prepared yet new and unique each time, a place where artists, public and artworks meet. Everything in the building is designed to make this encounter possible, easy and happy. Seen from this perspective, anything that might have seemed odd in this sculpture set amidst trees in the city center becomes perfectly legible, crystal clear.
The base is the place of preparations for the artists and everyone involved in the making of the shows. The auditoriums are rooted in it. This is a functional necessity, to be sure, but it is also a telling expression of the way in which creative work, preparations and rehearsals underpin the moment of encounter. In the base, are the rehearsal and dressing rooms along the periphery, most of them with discreet windows providing a view onto the outside, and, in the center, the lounge area and technical support facilities – in short, everything that makes it possible for the artists to get ready for the performances and to concentrate in an indispensable atmosphere of serenity, everything that makes for a creative and happy experience of the time they spend here.
The auditoriums are the place where the desired and prepared encounter happens. Inside the husk of their walls, is a functional, limited and modest space, which is transformed, during the time of the show, into a limitless, marvelous space. How is it that all these people who don’t know each other come together to form a “public,” that the artists meet this public and that together they rediscover a work of art, this is the real subject of each auditorium. And if each auditorium responds to the issue in a different way, as a function of its size and its purpose, all three are informed by the same will to serve the works and the performers in their encounter with the public, and to do so without imposing themselves as such. In the grand auditorium, the performers are everywhere surrounded by the public in a lyrical space where the seats are spread out over an undulating ground and curves run through the clear sky above. Here, a wide diversity of types of music, from the most ancient to the most contemporary, can be created, recreated and heard. The theater auditorium, with its much more conventional appearance, will lend itself to a frontal encounter between the orchestra and the public, but also to Chinese or Western opera performances. The “small” auditorium, which retains its intimacy even when filled to its maximum capacity of four hundred, will be the site of what characterizes new strains of music which, with few performers and little means, have always delved farther into the discovery of new worlds. These three altogether different auditoriums together form a single composition around a common circulation and exhibition space, and their exterior colors form a painting which appears at nightfall, like the sound of music emerging from silence, visible amongst the trees, the roads and the buildings of Pudong.
What is it? Simply this: A place for music. Covering very few square meters in a city where so many are being built every day, but encompassing so much happiness and enthusiasm. And, beyond the architecture, which is but a servant, plenty, plenty of music.