City Hall

This imposing building with its pale façade and clean, modern lines reflects the power and confidence of today’s Shanghai. This is City Hall, designed by Japanese architect Kenzō Tange, one of the great masters of twentieth-century urban planning, and completed in 1995. Rising more than seventy metres with eighteen floors, it houses over two thousand municipal officials, its design combining precision, natural light and functionality. Although not open to visitors, it remains the city’s nerve centre, where major economic, social and cultural decisions are made. However, the story of Shanghai’s city hall begins elsewhere: in the 30s it stood in Jiangwan in the north of the city, in a building that formed the heart of the Greater Shanghai Plan, an ambitious project launched by the Nationalist government to create a modern Chinese capital independent from the foreign concessions, where architect Dong Dayou combined Western modernism with Chinese tradition to create a distinctive style known as Chinese Art Deco. The Sino-Japanese War put an end to that vision, and the former city hall later became a university, the building still standing today in remarkable condition as a reminder of an avant-garde chapter in Shanghai’s history. The current city hall, meanwhile, truly embodies the Shanghai of today—open, dynamic and forward-looking—its story, stretching from the idealism of Jiangwan to the modernity of Kenzō Tange, echoing the city’s own journey from tradition to modernity, from aspiration to reality.