On 11 June 2026, the Royal Institute of British Architects announced that Rockbund Shanghai – a meticulous, nearly two-decade restoration of eleven colonial-era buildings on the Huangpu River – had received one of its International Awards for Excellence. For David Chipperfield, who first began work on the site in 2006 and saw it through to completion in September 2023, the recognition felt less like a trophy than a verdict: the most ambitious act of urban archaeology in contemporary Chinese architecture had been done properly.
The award places Rockbund among 34 winners across 15 countries and four continents, now in contention for the RIBA International Prize, to be announced at the Stirling Prize celebration in London on 15 October 2026. It also cements a relationship between a British practice and a Chinese city that has quietly become one of the most consequential architectural partnerships of the twenty-first century. As explored in The AD100 List 2024,Chipperfield’s practice sits at the apex of global architecture and design influence – a position the Rockbund award only reinforces.
Seventeen Years Among Colonial Façades
Rockbund sits in Shanghai’s former European concession, just north of the famous Bund, where a continuous street frontage along Yuanmingyuan Road reflects the layered colonial architecture of the early twentieth century – European styles combined with Asian elements, now weathered by decades of neglect. David Chipperfield Architects was commissioned to restore, upgrade and convert eleven of these buildings, ranging from the Art Deco Royal Asiatic Society Building (once China’s first public museum) to the Andrews & George Building, originally constructed in 1887.
The project unfolded in phases over seventeen years. The Rockbund Art Museum, housed within the restored Royal Asiatic Society Building, opened in 2010. Façade restorations across the historic blocks were completed by 2011. The shell and core of the Andrews & George Tower – the eleven-storey masonry extension that now mediates between the low-rise historic fabric and Shanghai’s high-rise skyline – was finished in 2021. Interior fit-outs and the landscape of the internal alleys followed, with the entire complex completed in September 2023.
The result is a neighbourhood rather than a single building: offices, apartments, restaurants, retail spaces and cultural venues woven together through a network of pedestrian lanes and internal squares. As Chipperfield’s practice described it, the final phase aimed “to transform these traditionally internal leftover areas to an extension of the overall public program and urban interface.”
A Counterargument to Demolition
Shanghai’s relationship with its built past has been fraught. Decades of rapid urbanisation flattened entire districts of lilong – the alleyway communities characteristic of early twentieth-century Shanghai – replacing them with glass towers and commercial developments that bore no trace of what came before. Rockbund, by contrast, demonstrated that restoration at scale could produce something more compelling than new construction.
“The project evolved over nearly two decades as a complex restoration of eleven diverse colonial-era buildings,” RIBA noted in its citation. The buildings were restored and adapted for cultural and commercial uses while “some were sensitively adapted and extended.” On the southern edge of the site, the Andrews & George Building was extended by eleven storeys in a stacked masonry construction – the new red-brick tower forming “a strong marker at the edge of the development, blending the historic with the new high-rise city beyond.”
Neil Gillespie, chair of RIBA’s Awards Group, said the broader 2026 cohort demonstrated “a strong sense of generosity towards people, place and the future.” He praised the winning projects for showing “the value of thoughtful, enduring design that is rooted in context and capable of enriching everyday life.” Rockbund, executed over seventeen years with that exact patience, exemplifies the principle.
The Shanghai Office: Twenty Years of Contextual Fluency
David Chipperfield’s engagement with Shanghai extends well beyond Rockbund. The practice established a Shanghai office in 2005 – initially as a representative office for Berlin, then as an independent practice in 2014. Now a compact team of thirty, the Shanghai office has developed what the practice describes as “a comprehensive understanding of the contextual conditions shared and differed from the west, in regard of the opportunities and constraints to achieve our ambitions.”
That institutional memory has produced a body of work unmatched by any other Western practice in China. The West Bund Museum, completed in 2017, brought a partnership with the Centre Pompidou to a triangular plot on the Shanghai Corniche, forming a key element of the city’s ambition to create a nine-square-kilometre cultural district on former industrial land. Expo Riverside Dingbo, completed in 2024, reconfigured the site of the 2010 World Expo with a 60,000-square-metre commercial building whose three stacked volumes – clad in dark brown glazed terracotta – create a deliberate dialogue with the neighbouring Power Station of Art. Bund City Hall Plaza, also completed in 2024, restored the former Shanghai Municipal Council building – listed as Cultural Heritage in 1989 – and extended it according to the unrealised original design by British architect T.C. Turner, whose 1922 plan had been curtailed by post-war material shortages.
Each project shares a methodology: deep research into local materials and typologies, adaptation rather than erasure, and the creation of public space as the primary civic gesture. The Zikawei Library, for instance, deployed reconstituted stone concrete to complement the red brick of the adjacent St Ignatius Cathedral, while its colonnaded façade borrowed from the historic Zikawei Bibliotheca. Chipperfield’s approach to Shanghai has never been about imposing a signature; it has been about listening to what the city already contains.
Sustainability Through Continuity
RIBA’s 2026 awards emphasised climate-responsive design and local materials, and Chipperfield’s Shanghai work aligns with those priorities in ways that transcend green-washing. The argument embedded in Rockbund, in the Zikawei Library, in the restoration of the SMC Building, is that the most sustainable building is the one already standing.
Adaptive reuse eliminates the embodied carbon of demolition and new construction while preserving the cultural memory embedded in existing structures. At Rockbund, the practice employed ‘Shanghai Plaster’ of the same quality as the adjoining historic buildings for new façade elements. At Expo Riverside Dingbo, the terracotta fins reference traditional Chinese ceramic materials while providing passive sun shading. These are not concessions to sustainability targets; they are expressions of a design philosophy in which material continuity and environmental responsibility are inseparable.
The Nobel Centre and the Global Practice
The Rockbund award arrives during a period of extraordinary activity for Chipperfield’s practice. In January 2026, the design for the Nobel Centre in Stockholm was finally unveiled – a £200 million headquarters for the Nobel Foundation, construction to begin in 2027 with an opening planned for 2031. The project has endured a tortured history: Chipperfield won the original competition in 2014, only for Sweden’s Land and Environment Court to block construction in 2018. The revised scheme, on a new waterfront site within the Foster + Partners-masterplanned Slussen regeneration, uses reclaimed bricks and staggered volumes designed to harmonise with Stockholm’s morphology.
“This project offers the opportunity to create the first dedicated home for the activities surrounding the Nobel Prize,” Chipperfield said. “We have sought to design a building that fulfils this responsibility on several scales.”
In London, meanwhile, the practice’s design for China’s proposed ‘super embassy’ opposite the Tower of London was approved by Housing Secretary Steve Reed in January 2026 following a protracted planning inquiry, though a judicial review brought by residents of the Royal Mint Estate is now scheduled for late June. In Milan, the 16,000-seat Arena Milano – designed in collaboration with Arup for the CTS Eventim Group – opened to the public in May 2026 as the centrepiece of the Santa Giulia regeneration, hosting events during the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. And in Barcelona, David Chipperfield Architects has been shortlisted for the Liceu Mar International Architecture Competition, the only British practice among five teams competing to design a new cultural venue on the Montjuïc waterfront.
What Rockbund Actually Proved
The temptation is to treat the RIBA award as a retrospective honour – a pat on the back for a project completed three years ago. That misses the point. What Rockbund demonstrated, over seventeen years and through a succession of careful interventions, is that architecture can operate on the timescale of a city rather than the timescale of a competition cycle.
RIBA President Chris Williamson described the 2026 winners as reflecting “the breadth and ambition of contemporary architecture at its best, through work that is globally diverse yet united by a shared commitment to improving how people live.” Rockbund embodies that ambition not through spectacle but through accretion – the slow, painstaking restoration of eleven buildings into a functioning neighbourhood, the insertion of pedestrian alleys where there were service yards, the transformation of a colonial relic into a public interface with the river.
David Chipperfield once told The Guardian: “I faked it at the beginning.” The remark, self-deprecating and characteristically wry, referred to his early career. There is nothing fake about what his practice has built in Shanghai. Rockbund is the real thing: architecture that has earned its place not through provocation but through patience, and now, at last, through the recognition of its peers. In the canon of London’s architectural masterpieces, Chipperfield’s name already appears; with Rockbund, his legacy now belongs equally to Shanghai.
The RIBA International Prize winner will be announced on 15 October 2026. Rockbund is in the running. Whatever the outcome, the project has already achieved something more durable than any award: it has changed how a city regards its own past.
