Shanghai Art Deco: towers, cinemas and flats, 1929–1941

The short answer. Most of Shanghai’s Art Deco went up in about eight years, between Sassoon House on the Bund in 1929 and the Bank of China next to it in 1937. In that time the city gained its first true skyscraper, a ring of tall apartment blocks in the French Concession, a string of first-run cinemas, a dance hall with a glass floor, and department stores with the first escalators in China. The money came from foreign property companies, above all Victor Sassoon’s, and increasingly from Chinese banks. Foreign firms drew most of the designs; Chinese contractors built nearly all of them, and by the early 1930s Chinese architects were designing some of them. The war of 1937 stopped almost everything. What survives is easy to read once you know the signs: a polished black or dark granite base, brown tiled walls, vertical strips running up to a stepped top, and metal, glass and geometric patterns where an older building would have had columns and swags.

What the word means, and what Shanghai called it

“Art Deco” is a name given after the fact. The Victoria and Albert Museum calls it a term coined in the 1960s; at the time the style was usually called Style Moderne, and its showcase was the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, which ran from late April to November 1925 and drew more than sixteen million visitors. Japan built a sizeable pavilion; China’s presence was modest. In Shanghai the stronger model was American: the gazetteer describes the Park Hotel, the Wing On tower and Grosvenor House as modelled on American skyscrapers, and their architects looked to New York and Chicago rather than Paris.

Shanghai’s own vocabulary was looser. The Shanghai Famous Buildings Gazetteer, compiled by the city’s local chronicles office, sorts the period’s buildings into three kinds. Some it calls American Art Deco, 装饰艺术风格: the Grand Theatre, the Cathay Theatre, the Majestic Theatre and several apartment blocks. A second group it calls American skyscraper Art Deco: the Park Hotel, the new Wing On tower and Grosvenor House. A third it calls simply modern, 近代式, a broad term for buildings without classical ornament. Sassoon House, usually listed as Art Deco today, the gazetteer describes as a building in transition from classicism to modernism. The labels matter less than the shift they describe: in the gazetteer’s account, the years 1919 to 1937 were when the modern movement reached Shanghai, design moved from classical revival to modernism, and steel frames became the normal way to build tall.

Why it all happened at once

The gazetteer’s own sample shows the timing. Of the 87 pre-1949 Western-style buildings it selects as Shanghai’s most notable, 23 were finished in 1921–30 and 33 in 1931–40, and only three in the whole of the 1940s. Building, it concludes, almost stopped after the war began in 1937.

Three things pushed in the same direction. The first was the price of land. The Settlement’s average assessed value rose from 10,476 taels a mu in 1920 to 33,877 in 1933, more than threefold in thirteen years, while more than 80,000 houses went up in the Settlement between 1919 and 1931. The second, according to the gazetteer’s entry on the Embankment Building, was the way the Settlement taxed property: by land area, not by floor area. A developer who put ten storeys of flats on a plot paid land tax on the plot, not on the flats. The third was a change in what a modern city was supposed to look like. The 1903 building rules had capped ordinary buildings at 85 feet unless the Council consented; by the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai had 96 buildings of eight storeys or more, and in January 1937 the Council brought in new rules for steel and reinforced-concrete frames and lifts. Liu Gang of Tongji University, quoted by the city’s information office, puts it simply: from the 1920s Shanghai, under the spell of American skyscrapers, was “in an atmosphere to grow higher”.

The boom in the Council’s books

The Municipal Council’s annual reports trace the curve year by year through the value of building permits it issued in the International Settlement. In 1928 permits were worth 20.2 million taels, more than double the 9.2 million of 1927; only two earlier years had been higher, 1921, the year of the HSBC permit, and 1926, the year of Sassoon House’s. The figure rose to 25.1 million in 1929 and to a peak of 46.6 million taels in 1930, then fell to 37.3 million in 1931. In 1932, after the fighting in Zhabei early that year, it dropped to 18.2 million, roughly half the year before. The Council began reporting in dollars in its later reports: 35.4 million in 1933, 27.6 million in 1934, and then the collapse after the silver crisis, 10.9 million in 1935 and 11.5 million in 1936. The number of new buildings permitted fell the same way, from 1,532 in 1930 to 828 in 1935.

The reports also show what kind of building the money bought. In 1928 the Council noted a rush on cinemas: 16 preliminary applications for theatre sites, 13 approved and seven theatres started in one year. In 1932, despite the fighting, its fire brigade reported “increased activity” in buildings over 75 feet, with “the foundations of some of the highest buildings in the Far East” being laid; it revised its fire specifications and published rules for pumps and tanks in buildings over 75 and over 150 feet. In 1932 eleven bank buildings were under construction in the Central District alone. Its rules for steel and reinforced-concrete buildings, which took effect on 1 January 1937, were drafted with the engineers and architects of “all the steel-framed or partly steel-framed buildings” put up in the Settlement since 1931, and had been in voluntary use before they became law.

Sassoon’s city

No one did more to change the skyline than Victor Sassoon, the head of E. D. Sassoon & Co., who moved to Shanghai in 1923 and turned the family firm toward property. His companies held large stocks of old lane housing, and the gazetteer says they pulled down a large number of lane houses and built ten tall buildings in their place.

The first was Sassoon House on the Bund, finished in 1929: 77 metres to the top of its green copper pyramid, with offices below, the Cathay Hotel on the fifth to ninth floors and Sassoon’s own flat at the top. The same year his Cathay Land Company finished Cathay Mansions on Rue Bourgeat (now Changle Road), a block of flats that cost 3.3 million yuan. At 14 storeys and 57 metres (another account gives 13 storeys and 65 metres) it was, with the Customs House and Sassoon House, one of the very few buildings in Shanghai taller than 50 metres. It already has the look of the decade to come: brown tile with white joints, stone window frames, and strong vertical lines.

Nearby, Sassoon’s company bought a plot in 1931 and in 1934 finished Grosvenor House. The central block rises 18 storeys; the wings step down through 16, 15, 14 and 13, so the whole building climbs to the middle, 78 metres at its highest. The facade is all vertical bands of brown tile; the interiors used geometric patterns. Its 77 flats had four passenger lifts and two for goods, central hot water and concealed wiring. The gazetteer gives the figures that explain why such buildings were built: land and construction cost 4.25 million yuan, and rents brought in 337,000 a year, enough to pay back the whole investment in thirteen years. Most of the first tenants were foreign managers and consuls.

On the north bank of Suzhou Creek, the Embankment Building, finished in 1935, replaced a lane estate called Baokang Li that the Sassoons had owned since 1887. It is an S-shaped block along the creek, the largest apartment building put up in Shanghai in the 1930s: shops on the ground floor, offices above, flats from the third to the seventh floor, 282 flats in all, and a swimming pool in the basement. Sassoon’s stone still carries the initials “E.D.S.” In the old city centre, Hamilton House at Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road (1931–33) and the Metropole Hotel on the corner opposite form a matched pair of stepped towers, with Art Deco patterns at the doors and on the tower. The Metropole was one of the first buildings in Shanghai set on deep piles; the gazetteer says the method was chosen so as not to disturb the Kincheng Bank next door.

All these were designed by Palmer & Turner, the firm that had built most of the Bund. So was Broadway Mansions (1930–34), built not by Sassoon but by the Shanghai Land Investment Company: a block of serviced flats at the mouth of Suzhou Creek that steps back floor by floor above the eleventh storey, with dark red granite at the base, brown Taishan brick above and Art Deco trim only at the eaves.

The Park Hotel: the first skyscraper

The building that defined the period was not a foreign one. In 1930 the Joint Savings Society, a savings bank formed by four Chinese commercial banks, decided to build a tall modern hotel facing the racecourse on Bubbling Well Road. It chose László Hudec, a Hungarian-trained architect who had arrived in Shanghai as an escaped prisoner of war in 1918 and had already built the society’s Union Building near the Bund. Hudec had spent part of 1929 in the United States drawing skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. The Park Hotel was the result.

Getting permission was the hard part. A China Press article of 1934, quoted by the city’s information office, said the Municipal Council had not allowed buildings of that height, citing the risks of fire and of sinking into Shanghai’s soft ground. Hudec first had to persuade his own clients that a skyscraper made sense, then return to the Council. Permission came only after he promised a fire look-out on the 22nd floor and guarantees on sprinklers, steel and materials.

Building it was a test of Chinese contractors. According to the gazetteer, seven Chinese and foreign firms wanted the job and the society leaned toward a foreign one. Tao Guilin, head of the Chinese contractor Voh Kee (馥记营造厂, Fùjì), went to the society’s vice-chairman Qian Xinzhi and argued that the design, the piling, the materials and the machinery were already in foreign hands; if the building work went to foreigners too, what would be left for China? Voh Kee had built the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou and part of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing. It won, at 700,000 yuan.

Piling began in May 1931 under a Danish firm, Kang Yi. The gazetteer describes five Oregon-pine piles under each steel column, the longest 39.8 metres, under a raft of reinforced concrete; the information office gives 400 piles of 33 metres. Both agree on the raft, and the gazetteer says the hotel has settled less than any other tall building of its generation. The frame was steel. The gazetteer says it was designed by Siemens and erected by the Chung Hwa shipyard; a study by Ye Jingxian and Corentin Fivet, drawing on the Hudec scholar Luca Poncellini, identifies the steel as Union Baustahl 52, a copper-chromium alloy patented in Dortmund in 1928, which cut the weight of the whole building by a third. The same study credits the hotel with the first automatic sprinkler system in China.

The finished building is 22 storeys above ground and two below, 83.6 metres in the gazetteer’s figure (83.8 in most others). The lower floors are polished black granite from Laoshan near Qingdao; above them the walls are brown tile, Taishan tile according to the information office. From the fifteenth floor the tower steps back on all four sides, and the vertical strips of the facade narrow as they rise. Inside were wire-mesh ornamental ceilings, a first in Shanghai, and the first air conditioning in a Chinese hotel. Mayor Wu Tiecheng cut the ribbon on 1 December 1934. The Council’s own report for the year records the opening of “the highest completed building in the Settlement” and notes that its fire installation, tested three days earlier, was the first in Shanghai with a manual increased-pressure circuit. The China Press called the hotel the first step toward raising Shanghai to the level of a “leading” city. At the end of that year the Chinese Engineering Society held its annual meeting in the building. The architect I. M. Pei, who grew up partly in Shanghai, later said the Park Hotel was what drew him to architecture.

For a moment it looked like the start of a race. Hudec received more commissions for tall buildings, and the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company drew up plans for a 40-storey tower on the Bund. Then the silver crisis of 1935 hit Shanghai’s banks, and the war of 1937 ended building altogether. The Park Hotel stayed the tallest building in Shanghai until the early 1980s.

Chinese builders, Chinese architects

The Park Hotel story is the best known of many. The gazetteer’s survey of the period’s buildings finds that nearly all of them were designed by foreign firms and built by Chinese ones, and it names the contractors: Voh Kee for the Park Hotel, the new Wing On building, the Dah Sun store and the Bank of Communications; Sin Jin Kee (新仁记) for Sassoon House, Broadway Mansions, Hamilton House and the Metropole; Wang Sun Kee for Cathay Mansions; four firms together for the Picardie. Ye and Fivet, citing the city’s chronicles, put numbers on the shift. In 1916 Shanghai had 22 large foreign contractors and 31 Chinese; by 1930 more than 100 Chinese firms were registered against 20 foreign; by the end of 1934 there were 2,623 construction firms and building-material makers. All 31 buildings of more than ten storeys built in Shanghai in the 1930s, they write, were built by Chinese contractors.

The careers behind those numbers were often short and steep. Tao Guisong, born in 1879 in Chuansha east of the river to a farming family, worked as a cooper and then as a mould-maker in a pipe works before a contractor took him on as a subcontractor on the Wing On building in 1918. He founded his own firm, 陶桂记 (Táoguìjì), in 1920; it built the superstructure of the new Wing On tower in 1932, and in 1935 Tao designed and built himself a house in his home town that put Western towers on a stone-gate courtyard plan.

The builders organised. The Shanghai Builders’ Association was started in 1930 and formally founded on 28 February 1931 with more than a hundred members; from November 1932 to April 1937 it published The Builder (《建筑月刊》), 46 issues on construction, materials and prices. The architects had their own body, the Society of Chinese Architects, founded in 1927, and from November 1932 their own journal, The Chinese Architect (《中国建筑》). Ye and Fivet note that by the 1930s Chinese manufacturers were supplying cement, steel windows and paint that had once been imported, The “Taishan” facing bricks on the Park Hotel and Broadway Mansions were a Chinese product; a 2024 study traces them through important buildings in Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou from 1922 to 1937.

Chinese architects began to take the modern style for themselves. Zhuang Jun (庄俊), trained at the University of Illinois, designed the Continental Emporium on Nanjing Road East (1931–33) for the Continental Bank: a shopping and office block of vertical lines and zigzag window ornament, climbing in steps to a nine-storey corner tower. He kept the old lane that ran through the site and turned it into a covered cross-passage so that shoppers could walk through. Yang Xiliu (杨锡镠), a Nanyang University graduate, designed the Paramount. Allied Architects (华盖建筑事务所), founded in 1932 by Zhao Shen, Chen Zhi and Tong Jun, designed the Metropol cinema, opened in 1933 and demolished in 2004. Fan Wenzhao’s work shows the change within one career: his Nanking Theatre of 1930, designed with Zhao Shen, is all Ionic columns and relief; his Majestic Theatre of 1941 turns the corner with a plain cylindrical tower and tall windows of geometric glass.

The picture palaces

Cinemas were where most Shanghainese met the new style. The gazetteer counts nearly a hundred cinemas and theatres showing films in the city from the late 1920s into the 1930s. The first-run houses, the Grand, the Metropol, the Majestic, the Roxy, the Doumer, the Nanking and the Cathay, had heating and cooling, comfortable seats and the first rights to new Hollywood films. They were built for sound, which had just arrived, and for the crowds it brought.

The Grand Theatre has the most dramatic history. The first Grand opened on the last day of 1928, a classical building with a pillared front. In 1930 it showed Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger, released in China as 不怕死, which portrayed the Chinese of Chinatown as thieves and opium dealers. The playwright Hong Shen, then a professor at Fudan University, led the protest; students, cultural groups and overseas Chinese joined it, and the cinema’s business collapsed. In 1932 a new company paid 1 million taels for it, pulled down the four-year-old building and hired Hudec. His new Grand, finished in 1933, is the building the gazetteer calls the turning point of his style: a play of thick and thin horizontal and vertical bands, large sheets of glass and an off-centre translucent light tower, 30.5 metres high with its sign. Inside were twelve chrome-framed glass doors, black marble, a terrazzo foyer inlaid with steel strips, a lit fountain in the upstairs lounge, more than 2,000 seats, and headsets that gave a Chinese commentary on foreign films.

The Cathay Theatre on Avenue Joffre, designed by C. H. Gonda’s firm and opened on 1 January 1932. Its corner front is a stack of vertical strips, alternating windows and dark tiles faced with purple-red Taishan brick and white joints, rising to a stepped central tower. Its newspaper advertisement in Shen Bao promised “the sum of modern science”. Ten years later the Majestic, opened on 15 October 1941 with more than 1,600 seats, was the last of the line.

The dance halls followed the cinemas. The Paramount, 百乐门, was built on Yuyuan Road near Jing’an Temple for the merchant Gu Liancheng at a cost of 700,000 taels. Its dance floor had no columns, a sprung wooden centre and borders of thick glass lit from below; 18,000 lamps lit the hall; and a glass tower on the street corner could be seen from far off. The gazetteer says it was finished in 1932; Shen Bao reported its opening on 15 December 1933.

The Paramount was the grandest of a whole class. Ballroom dancing had come to Shanghai with foreign residents, at first at private dances in the Astor House and the Carlton; by the 1930s, the gazetteer says, the craze had spread across the city, and the commercial halls multiplied: the Ciro’s on Nanjing Road, the Lido on Taixing Road, the MGM on Tibet Road, and two more on Gordon Road. The halls were designed for the same effects as the cinemas: lighting that could be dimmed and coloured, ventilation for crowds, and an entrance that could be seen from a car. At the Paramount the air was changed every ten minutes through a thousand small holes in the roof, and the doormen flashed a departing guest’s car number on the corner tower so that the chauffeur, waiting down the street, knew to drive up.

Stores and flats

The department stores on Nanjing Road raced each other upward. Wing On’s original store of 1918 had a classical tower; in 1932 the company added a steel-framed tower of 22 storeys, 72 metres, on a triangular lot next door, designed by the American firm Hazzard (哈沙德洋行) in the manner of American skyscrapers, with green granite at street level, pale yellow tile above and a lit crown. Its top floors became the “Seventh Heaven”, 七重天, of restaurants and entertainment. The last of the four great stores, Dah Sun, opened on 10 January 1936. It was designed by the Chinese firm Kwan, Chu and Yang (基泰工程司), with Yang Tingbao among its architects, and built by Voh Kee: ten storeys on 240 piles of 37 metres and 862 of 30 metres, cream glazed tile, black Qingdao granite, Chinese patterns in the terrazzo, seven Otis lifts and two escalators, the first in China, each said to carry 4,000 people an hour.

The apartment blocks were the other new type. The gazetteer explains them by land prices: as land grew dear, developers built upward, and the new blocks came with lifts, central heating, gas, hot water, refrigerators and garages, and were let mostly to foreigners. The Picardie on Avenue Pétain (now Hengshan Road), finished in 1934 for the International Savings Society to a design by the French firm Minutti & Co., spreads in a stepped fan from 9 storeys at the ends to 15 in the middle, 65 metres high. Its 87 flats had six passenger lifts and three for goods, and every kitchen had a servant’s room behind it with its own entrance. It remained the tallest building in western Shanghai until the 1980s.

The last of it

The war cut the period off. The Bank of China, planned in 1934 as a 34-storey tower in a Palmer & Turner concept, was built to 17 storeys, just short of Sassoon House, and finished at the end of 1937 with the fighting around it. Its architect, Lu Qianshou (陆谦受) of the bank’s own building department, gave an Art Deco steel tower a blue glazed pyramid roof, stone brackets and window grilles in the shape of coins. The gazetteer counts it among a group of 1930s buildings that put Chinese motifs on a Western frame, a sign, it says, of some weariness with purely Western styles. Hudec’s last Shanghai building was a private house, the Woo Tung Wen house on Tongren Road (1937), green-tiled and curved like a liner, with a dance hall, a sun room, the first private lift in Shanghai and a traditional Buddhist shrine for the owner’s wife. On the Bund, the Bank of Communications by Gonda’s firm, begun in 1946 and finished in 1948, is a late, plain Art Deco block with little ornament: the last building of the Bund before 1949.

The style had reached the Council’s own works too. The municipal slaughterhouse in Hongkou, now the 1933 Old Millfun, built by the Council in 1931–33, is a four-storey concrete maze of ramps and bridges designed to keep cattle and people apart, its thick double walls pierced with ventilation holes.

Second lives

Almost every one of these buildings survived the war and the decades after it, usually by changing what it was for. The towers built for foreign tenants became the state’s buildings for receiving foreigners. In 1951 the city set up the Jin Jiang Hotel in Cathay Mansions as its first state guesthouse, with the restaurateur Dong Zhujun as chairman; Grosvenor House became its VIP building. Richard Nixon stayed on its sixteenth floor in February 1972, and the final text of the Shanghai Communiqué was settled in his suite before being signed in the hotel’s small auditorium. In 1955 the Picardie became a guesthouse for Soviet experts. Some flats went to a different clientele: in 1956 the city housing authority took over Grosvenor House’s residential side, renamed it the Maoming Apartments and allotted flats to senior writers, translators and doctors.

The Park Hotel joined the Jinjiang group, and in 1950 the city fixed the origin of its survey grid at the centre of the hotel’s rooftop flagpole; a marker in the lobby, directly below it, has shown the spot since 1997. The entertainment buildings became cultural ones. The Grand Theatre was refitted with East German equipment in 1958 as Shanghai’s first widescreen cinema. The Paramount’s main hall became the Hongdu Theatre, staging Yue and Hu opera as well as films. The Cathay took down its English sign after it became a public-private enterprise in 1954, was renamed the People’s Cinema in 1966 and got its old name back in 1979. On Nanjing Road, Dah Sun became the city’s first large state department store, the No. 1 Department Store, and in 1958 Shanghai’s first television station broadcast from the new Wing On tower.

Where the sources disagree

How long the Park Hotel was the tallest. The gazetteer says 48 years, until the Shanghai Hotel overtook it in 1982; the city’s information office says it dominated the skyline until 1983; Ye and Fivet, citing a Chinese architectural history of 2008, say it was the tallest building in Asia until 1958. The three claims measure different things, Shanghai, China and Asia, and none of the sources explains its comparison.

The Park Hotel’s piles. The gazetteer describes five piles under each column, the longest 39.8 metres; the information office describes 400 piles of 33 metres. They may be counting different things; neither gives a full specification.

Who built the Bank of China. The same gazetteer gives two answers. Its overview credits Voh Kee (陶馥记); its entry on the contractor Tao Guisong says his firm, 陶桂记, won the job by bidding the shortest construction time and finished it at the end of 1937. The two firms’ names differ by a single character, and the confusion runs through later accounts.

Who built the Majestic. The gazetteer’s entry on the theatre names Voh Kee; its entry on Tao Guisong lists the Majestic among 陶桂记’s works of 1939–41.

When some buildings were finished. The gazetteer dates the Metropole Hotel to 1934, but photographs in the University of Bristol’s collection show it under construction in 1930. It dates the Paramount to 1932, while Shen Bao reported its opening in December 1933. Grosvenor House is 1934 in the gazetteer and 1935 in the heritage registers.

What to call it. The gazetteer calls Sassoon House transitional and the Bank of Communications a compromise between classical and modern; most guidebooks call both Art Deco. The style label is a later convention; the buildings were described at the time as “modern”.

What to look for

Nanjing West Road at Huanghe Road. Stand on the People’s Park side. The Park Hotel and the Grand Theatre stand side by side, both by Hudec, both of 1933–34. Look at the hotel’s base of polished black granite, then up the brown-tile strips to the stepped top above the fifteenth floor. The cinema’s off-centre glass tower and horizontal bands are the other half of his style.

Maoming South Road and Huaihai Middle Road. Walk south from Changle Road past Cathay Mansions and Grosvenor House in the Jin Jiang Hotel grounds; the stepped wings of Grosvenor House show best from Maoming South Road. One block south, on the corner of Huaihai Road, is the Cathay Theatre, its purple-red brick and stepped tower almost unchanged.

Jiangxi Middle Road at Fuzhou Road. Hamilton House and the Metropole Hotel face each other across the junction as a pair; look for the Art Deco reliefs over the doors.

Suzhou Creek. From the Bund end of Waibaidu Bridge, Broadway Mansions steps up on the north bank; walk west along North Suzhou Road to the long curve of the Embankment Building and look for the “E.D.S.” stone.

Nanjing Road East. The new Wing On tower, the Continental Emporium with its covered lane, and Dah Sun at Xizang Road, now the No. 1 Department Store, are all on the pedestrian street.

Further west. The Picardie on Hengshan Road, the Paramount on Yuyuan Road by Jing’an Temple, the Majestic on Jiangning Road, and the green Woo Tung Wen house on Tongren Road.

The details. Everywhere, look for the same kit: a dark stone plinth; brown or cream tile above; vertical piers that run past the floor lines; a stepped or tiered top; metal-framed doors; geometric patterns in grilles, balustrades and terrazzo floors.

What is gone. Allied Architects’ Metropol cinema was demolished in 2004. The Embankment Building gained three storeys in 1978. The Park Hotel’s ground-floor lobby was restored to its Art Deco style only in 2001.