The historic urban fabric along Ouyang, Shanyin, and Xiangde Roads in Hongkou District forms a distinctive chapter in Shanghai’s heritage. Unlike the ordered grandeur of the former French Concession, this neighborhood is shaped by heterogeneous textures, profound revolutionary history, and deep literary roots. In the 1980s, I spent much of my childhood here visiting my grandparents and uncles at Xingye Fang on Shanyin Road; those days left me with an indelible, lived familiarity with the everyday rhythms of these lanes. Returning decades later to lead the micro-renovation of three strategic nodes represents an intimate convergence of personal spatial memory and contemporary urban practice. Historic urban regeneration rarely demands radical formal gestures. It calls for deep respect and precise mending: light-touch interventions that slip into urban crevices, preserve original fabrics, and rekindle everyday domestic life, establishing a durable, enduring symbiosis among heritage, nature, and modernity.
The Ouyang Road 254 and 255 blocks in Hongkou District represent one of Shanghai’s first urban regeneration pilots supported by the central fiscal budget, as well as a living, vibrant quarter carrying a century of multi-layered memories. The entire 16.5-hectare site is situated at the historic border zone between the former International Settlement and the Chinese Municipality. This unique geographical attribute endowed the neighborhood with a distinctive hybrid character and an inclusive heritage.
Here lie preserved the leftist cultural imprints left by intellectuals like Lu Xun during their deep engagements, alongside a rich assemblage of architectural typologies—including English garden houses, Japanese-style lilong lanes, Soviet-style apartments, and modern industrial factory buildings—making it a rare open-air architectural museum in Shanghai. As time passed, the aging community gradually showed signs of fatigue in the 21st century: facilities aged, public space became deficient, and street-lane fabrics fragmented. The once warm and lively lilong slowly lost the public spaces where people could relax, linger, and share communal life.
This district-wide renewal was coordinated comprehensively by the Ouyang Road Sub-district Office. Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd. (SMEDI) led the overall territorial planning and EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) general contracting, with dedicated cultural and commercial curation integrated into the process. Scenic Architecture Office provided consulting advisory on the urban and architectural townscape, and was responsible for the detailed design work of three crucial micro-renovation nodes.
Through thorough positioning and curation as well as meticulous community research, the collaborative project team jointly established the core renewal principles of mending, daily life, and symbiosis. By reorganizing neighborhood circulation and public spaces, we replaced rough-and-ready demolition and alteration with acupuncture-like interventions—gradually repairing urban gaps to awaken the dormant vitality and human warmth of the quarter.
In the initial phase of the design, I often walked back and forth among the three sites. Behind the tall plane trees lay low courtyard walls, narrow and deep alleys, and grey-beige old houses; they constantly emerged through the gaps between the trees, revealing touching details such as roughcast plaster walls, grey bricks and red roof tiles, lacquered wooden doors and windows, and more.
I thought that an architect’s intervention in this neighborhood in the 21st century—while respecting the original street-lane patterns and site traces—should not, and indeed does not need to, simply repeat the design language of the past. Instead, one can utilize modern materials and structural spaces under the renewal principles of contextual harmony, lightweight intervention, and vitality activation. In this way, the new design remains tucked behind the plane trees, providing the community with public space vessels well-suited to contemporary daily life.
The Oh-Yeah Pocket Park at the corner of Ouyang Road and Xiangde Road is our "gentle" repair of a street corner urban space. Standing within the site is a century-old, English-style red-brick house—originally designed by Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects, one of the most prominent Chinese modern architectural practices in the early 20th century. After years of vacancy, its surrounding area had devolved into a passive, dilapidated urban void. We cleared the cluttered site and preserved five original mature trees. In front of the old red-brick house—rehabilitated under the principle of "repairing the old as old"—we redefined the boundaries of the courtyard using beige-grey granolithic aggregate (shuixishi) paving and benches. We then designed a series of corridors using celadon folded-plate steel structures, which weave and turn around the old trees to connect the urban sidewalk, the internal plaza of the pocket park, and the historic brick building.
This corridor courtyard creates a new public space: it possesses clear boundaries yet remains permeable inside and out, capable of accommodating gatherings while offering shelter from wind and rain. Furthermore, we folded celadon perforated steel plates into low walls, paying tribute to the community's old courtyard walls while providing a public display interface for community memories, fostering offline exchanges of residents' old and new photographs as well as small secondhand market activities. Under the street-facing canopy, "beam-tables" are connected between the umbrella-shaped columns, turning structural components into an urban bar counter accessible from both inside and outside the park. In the years to come, we hope community residents, neighborhood workers, and urban flâneurs can all coexist within the leisurely everyday life of this corner park, living in symbiosis with nature and historical memory.
The intersection of Shanyin Road and Tian’ai Branch Road (Lane 274 Shanyin Road) serves as the southwestern gateway of this urban regeneration project. On the northeast corner of the crossroads stands Longlife Nursing Home, a three-story nursing home built in the 1980s. The completed facade renovation and the ongoing courtyard transformation represent a corrective realignment for the district’s unbalanced streetscape. Due to an alteration in the 1990s, the building had been overlaid with convoluted, ostentatious European-style decorations and a pink exterior facade. Its relatively massive volume, along with its discordant forms and color scheme, had long severed the surrounding gentle and understated architectural context, turning it into an abrupt presence along Shanyin Road.
Upon obtaining the original drawings from the early 1980s, we decided to strip away all redundant, late-added artificial ornamentation, returning to the building’s authentic structural skeleton and original facade framework. We reinstated and reinforced the architectural vocabulary of carved openings within continuous gable walls from the initial design, realigning the building's massing and character with the scale and rhythmic order of the historic quarter. Celadon-colored aluminum alloy grilles are dry-hung on the exterior of the gable walls, concealing the legacy of various exposed exterior conduits and air-conditioning compressors while leaving space for climbing ivy to grow. This allows the building's large mass to gradually blend into and disappear among the roadside trees amid the slow, seasonal growth of greenery. Inside the gable openings, warm off-white walls and natural-wood-toned window frames were used to subtly echo the material tactility of surrounding historic structures.
The renovation here neither deliberately replicates a retro style nor pursues assertive modern forms. Instead, through an apt and measured design language, it reintegrates the once-intrusive building into the neighborhood fabric and natural environment. While creating a tranquil and healing elderly care space, it restores the balanced, gentle, and understated baseline character of the street and lane fabric.
Along Tian’ai Road, two rows of metasequoias stand lush and deep, where Wild Grass Hut faces the Lu Xun Memorial Hall across the street. The dilapidated, single-story pitched-roof building—measuring merely 6 meters wide by 8 meters deep—was wedged tightly between two residential buildings. Despite its cramped scale and constrained site, this unique state of surviving within a crevice evokes Mr. Lu Xun’s reflections in the preface to his prose poem collection Wild Grass on the fragility and resilience, decay and renewal of life. Grounded in the site's rigorous constraints and the area's profound literary heritage, I specially chose to cultivate this blade of "wild grass" right here: a micro-scale humanistic space nestled in the gap.
The split-pitched roof erected with a lightweight steel structure assumes an ordinary, understated form. Looking across from Lu Xun Park, the renewed building remains embedded within this narrow slot, leaving the fabric of the original neighborhood unaltered. Approaching closely, climbing vines on the security grilles veil the flanking windows of the adjacent residential buildings; this recessed entrance forecourt features only knee-high flowers and plants, with a central path paved in clay bricks leading toward the set-back multipurpose space.
The interior is transparent in the front and enclosed at the rear, functioning as an open public living room. In the back, five full-width stepped terraces invite both walking and sitting, reinforcing the venue's sense of gathering. A central single-flight staircase serves as the sole structural entity in the space, working alongside a pair of portal frame columns to support the mezzanine loft and the roof. The horizontal "weathered-timber" loft resembles the tingzijian (garret room) of traditional new-style lilong houses, where one can sit on high stools and gaze out toward the park. The roof slopes upward along with the staircase, while flanking skylights cast down shifting daylight and cloud shadows.
Furthermore, everything within this small structure gains an infinite horizontal extension through the reflections of the mirrored gable walls on both sides, endowing this tiny square-inch space with a luminous, expansive spirit where the virtual and the real coexist. With its external modesty and humble scale contrasted against internal breadth and depth, might this temporary dwelling of the "wild grass" spirit provoke visitors—beyond their daily routines—into self-reflection and inner search?
Team:
Client: Ouyang Road Sub-district Office, Hongkou District People's Government, Shanghai
Architectural Design: Scenic Architecture Office
Principal Architect: Zhu Xiaofeng
Project Manager: Zhuang Xinjia
Project Architects: Su Kaiqiang (Wild Grass Hut), Sun Xueyi (Longlife Nursing Home), Xie Jiachen (Oh-Yeah Pocket Park)
Structural Consultant: SGIDI Engineering Consulting (Group) Co., Ltd.
Local design institute: Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd.
Landscape Design: Growdesign Co.Ltd.
General Contractor: Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd.
Interior Contractor: Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd. (Wild Grass Hut)
Photography: Liang Shan
