Sir David Chipperfield does not design buildings that shout. His architecture is measured, quiet, and deliberate – a quality the Pritzker jury praised in 2023 when they awarded him architecture’s highest honour, describing his work as “subtle yet powerful, subdued yet elegant.” Over the past two decades, this restraint has been tested more rigorously than anywhere else in Shanghai, where Chipperfield has accumulated a body of work that is at once his most ambitious and his most contested. His Shanghai portfolio – encompassing the Rockbund restoration, the West Bund Museum, the Bund City Hall Plaza, and the Zhangyuan masterplan – constitutes a case study in what happens when a Pritzker-calibre architect operates within the constraints of China’s state-driven development model. For a practice rooted in London’s architectural culture, Shanghai represents something altogether different: a test of whether design authority can survive at scale.
The Shanghai Office and the Scale of Ambition
David Chipperfield Architects opened its Shanghai office around 2005, making it one of five global outposts alongside London, Berlin, Milan, and Santiago de Compostela. The firm’s decision to embed itself in Shanghai was not incidental. The city’s explosive growth – and its appetite for international architectural talent – offered a proving ground of a different order to the European restorations that had cemented Chipperfield’s reputation. The Neues Museum in Berlin, completed in 2009, had demonstrated his capacity to revive damaged historic structures with sensitivity rather than pastiche. Shanghai would demand that same skill at a vastly different scale, and under conditions far less within the architect’s control.
Rockbund: Eighteen Years of Careful Surgery
The centrepiece of Chipperfield’s Shanghai work is Rockbund, a approximately $1bn mixed-use development on Yuanmingyuan Road, a short distance north of the historic Bund. The project involved the restoration and conversion of eleven buildings dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constructed during the period of the former European concession. These structures – originally housing institutions ranging from the China Baptist Publication Society to the Young Women’s Christian Association – reflect a hybrid of European architectural styles combined with Asian decorative elements, though as Chipperfield has noted, they were “fairly second-division stuff compared to the grand stone buildings along the Bund – predominantly brick and not so well built.”
The project spanned nearly two decades. Only four of the eleven buildings originally held protected status, but Chipperfield’s team convinced the Shanghai authorities that the full ensemble deserved preservation. The guiding principle was articulated by Libin Chen, the director of Chipperfield’s Shanghai office: “If you send an old man to hospital, you don’t want a young man to come out.” Facades were meticulously cleaned and repaired without destroying original fabric. Interior details, including terrazzo-floored lobbies, were restored. The alleyways between buildings – traditionally neglected leftover spaces – were opened up into public passages leading to a central square, creating a network of pedestrian routes that proved unexpectedly magnetic to Shanghai’s social media culture.
The Rockbund Art Museum, housed in the former Royal Asiatic Society Building – once China’s first public museum – was given a new entrance facing the square, rendered in textured Shanghai plaster, a material historically used as a cheap alternative to stone but now a rare craft. The project was completed in 2023 and in October 2025 received an American Institute of Architects Merit Award in the category of Urban Design, credited with “promoting a new approach to historic restoration in a Chinese context.”
Yet the project is not without its contradictions. Behind the restored facades, half the city block facing the street to the rear was demolished and replaced with office and residential towers designed by the Shanghai office of Arquitectonica. As one local architect told The Guardian, “They call it a preservation project. I call it a demolition project.” Chipperfield has acknowledged the limitation: “There’s a faultline running down the middle of the block. These buildings were out of our control.”
West Bund Museum: A Sketch Through a Developer’s Lens
If Rockbund represents Chipperfield at his most patient, the West Bund Museum illustrates a different dynamic entirely. Opened in November 2019 as Shanghai’s satellite branch of the Centre Pompidou, the 22,000-square-metre gallery sits on a triangular plot at the tip of a new public park along the Huangpu River. The building consists of three main gallery volumes arranged in a pin-wheel formation around a central lobby, with glass facades that give the structure an opaline quality – iridescent by day, prismatic at night.
The partnership between the Centre Pompidou and the Shanghai West Bund Group was inaugurated in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron and renewed for a further five years in November 2023. During its first four years, despite disruptions from the pandemic, the museum established itself as one of Shanghai’s leading cultural institutions.
Chipperfield, however, has been candid about his dissatisfaction. “I’m not so happy with the West Bund project,” he told The Guardian in January 2024, explaining that his office had been approached to design flexible gallery spaces “without a museum director, without a programme, without anything.” The detailed design was never completed before the Pompidou partnership was announced and construction was already underway. “We discovered that they were already building it, before we had done any detailed design.” The result, he suggested, was “a Chipperfield sketch filtered through a developer’s lens.”
Bund City Hall Plaza and the Politics of Heritage
Chipperfield’s most politically charged Shanghai project is the Bund City Hall Plaza, the refurbishment and extension of the former Shanghai Municipal Council building, originally designed by British architect T.C. Turner and completed in 1922. Listed as Cultural Heritage in 1989, the building served as the headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Council of the International Settlement and later the Shanghai Municipal Government. Turner’s original design intended to occupy the entire perimeter of the city block, framing a central courtyard, but post-World War I material shortages left three quarters of the building complete.
Chipperfield’s scheme restores the original structure, opens key historic interiors to the public for the first time, and completes the urban block with a new office building whose facade is a stripped-back neoclassical interpretation of the historic original. A permeable ground floor activates the central courtyard, and a set-back pavilion along the roofline hosts bars and restaurants with panoramic city views. The project, set to open in 2025, is an exercise in how heritage can be extended without being falsified.
Zhangyuan: The Limits of the Architect’s Hand
Perhaps the most uncomfortable chapter in Chipperfield’s Shanghai story is the Zhangyuan masterplan. Zhangyuan is one of Shanghai’s most important historic lilong neighbourhoods – a dense grid of narrow lanes lined with two- and three-storey shikumen courtyard homes, a classic Shanghai typology blending Western and Chinese elements. In 2019, the local government decreed that residents would be relocated and the area converted into a mixed-use development for “leisure, commerce, fashion and culture.”
David Chipperfield Architects was commissioned for the masterplan in 2020. The office has pointed out that it did not work on the restoration of the individual buildings. Nevertheless, the result – an open-air luxury retail precinct where Dior and Louis Vuitton occupy former homes – has drawn sharp criticism. Chipperfield has wrestled publicly with the ethical dimension: “From the beginning, we always say, ‘Isn’t there a way of decanting people and bringing them back?’ But even Libin will say, ‘People don’t want to come back. They’re offered something better further out, with modern kitchens etc. They want that.’ I have to trust his judgment.”
The Ethical Calculus of Working in China
Chipperfield’s willingness to work in China has prompted broader questions about the ethical responsibilities of international architects. His Berlin office allows staff to vote on which commissions the practice accepts, and the firm has recently drafted – and then dismantled – an internal ethics charter. “It said we wouldn’t do prisons,” Chipperfield explained. “But if I was approached by the Swiss government to do a prison, I presume they’d be coming to us because we might do an innovative prison. Ultimately, you have to take each project and smell it out.”
The question of control is one he returns to frequently. “Over the last 18 years, at regular intervals, I have said, ‘Why do I have an office in Shanghai?’ It’s a pointless exercise in some sense. But you have to take the risk.” He points to the Ninetree Village housing project in Hangzhou as proof that the gamble can pay off: “A super client, very good quality finish. For each one of those, you get 20 rubbish things.”
In his Pritzker acceptance speech, Chipperfield framed architecture’s purpose in terms of collective responsibility: “We know that, as architects, we can have a more prominent and engaged role in creating not only a more beautiful world but a fairer and more sustainable one too. We must rise to this challenge and help inspire the next generation to embrace this responsibility with vision and courage.” In Shanghai, that challenge is playing out not in grand manifestos but in the painstaking, compromised work of persuasion – convincing officials that old buildings need not be demolished, that heritage can generate value, and that an architect’s role is sometimes to hold the line rather than draw the line.
What Shanghai Reveals About the Practice of Architecture
Chipperfield’s Shanghai work is not a story of triumph. It is a story of negotiation – with developers, with government, with the limits of what an architect can control in a system fundamentally different from the European contexts in which he built his reputation. The Rockbund restoration is genuinely groundbreaking; the AIA recognition confirms that. But the West Bund Museum, the Zhangyuan conversion, and the Bund City Hall Plaza each reveal a different pressure point.
What Shanghai does demonstrate is the durability of Chipperfield’s core conviction: that architecture’s value lies not in spectacle but in the quality of the public realm it produces. The back alleys of Rockbund, filled with young people posing against restored brick walls, are evidence that this conviction can take root even in the most commercially driven environment. As Chipperfield has said, “Good architecture provides an environment. It is there, but it is also not there.” In Shanghai, it is there – imperfectly, stubbornly, and on terms that are not entirely his own.
