Wukang Mansion

Wukang Mansion (武康大楼, Wǔkāng Dàlóu) is the eight-storey wedge where Huaihai Middle Road meets Wukang Road in the former French Concession. It was built in 1924 as the Normandie Apartments to a design by László Hudec (邬达克), and it is still what it was built to be: a block of flats, now with shops under its arcade.

The site explains the shape. The International Savings Society (万国储蓄会), through its property company, took a triangular plot where Avenue Joffre, now Huaihai Middle Road, met Route Ferguson, now Wukang Road. Hudec, a Hungarian who had arrived in Shanghai in 1918, drew a triangular plan to fit it. The point of the triangle faces west, and from across the junction the building narrows to a prow; the gazetteer compares it to a warship with its bow raised. Six road arms meet here: both directions of Huaihai Middle Road, Yuqing Road, Tianping Road, Xingguo Road and Wukang Road.

Because the pavement along the main road was narrow, the ground floor was built as an arcade, a continuous run of arches over the footway in the French manner; the Shanghai gazetteer calls this the city’s earliest veranda-style apartment building. Above it the facade is French Renaissance in style and divided into three bands by long balconies. The first two floors read as a base. The third floor has an open gallery and windows topped with triangular pediments, the fourth and fifth floors carry groups of projecting balconies, and the top floor has another gallery running round the building. The walls are cement rendered to imitate stone, in a brown-yellow colour.

The building stands 30 metres high on 1,580 square metres of ground, with a floor area of 9,275 square metres. It was reinforced concrete, with three lifts, 63 apartments of one to four rooms, and more than 30 rooms for servants. Most living rooms face south; two light wells were cut into the north side for light and air. In 1930 the society added a five-storey annex of about 1,700 square metres, known as the New Wukang Building.

The early tenants were mainly executives of foreign firms. The savings society owned the building until 1945 and the Central Trust until 1953, when the Shanghai municipal government took it over, renamed it after Wukang Road and allocated the flats as public housing. From then on its residents included people from the film world: the actor Zhao Dan (赵丹, 1915–1980), the director Zheng Junli (郑君里, 1911–1969) and the actor Sun Daolin (孙道临), who lived here for nearly thirty years and liked the view across the road to the trees around the former residence of Soong Ching-ling (宋庆龄), the white building opposite.

The city listed Wukang Mansion among its outstanding historical buildings in 1994. A four-month renovation in 2019 repaired the roofs, window sills, brickwork, balcony ironwork and drains, moved the overhead cables underground, and removed the clutter of air-conditioning units and awnings from the facade. It was the first project in Shanghai to combine historic-building repair with the renovation of old housing, and its stated aim was to bring the building back to its original appearance.