Shanghai Greenhouse Garden. The Hall Is Still There

The first thing you notice is steel. Above the glass houses stands the truss of a factory hall, girders and braces and tension cables, visibly older than everything below it. Until a few decades ago Shanghai No. 3 Steel Works ran on this site. The Viennese office Delugan Meissl did not take the frame down but put the new houses inside it.

The southern part of Expo Culture Park has been open since 20 September 2024. The greenhouse garden has a good 22,000 square metres above ground and almost twice that below, and at its highest point it is 35 metres. Inside are three houses, sorted by habitat rather than by country of origin: dry with olives and big cacti, humid and shaded with bodhi trees and staghorn ferns, humid and sunny with flame trees and traveller's palms. A good three hundred species. The structure and the climate engineering come from Bollinger und Grohmann and from Transsolar, and the park as a whole was planned by Sasaki.

What is worth seeing is the place where the old geometry and the new one do not fit together. The grid of the hall is rectangular and regular, the pavilions underneath are round, the facade runs through in one long wave, and between them hangs a white ceiling construction with oval openings that drop light onto walkways and palms. From outside you see both at once, because the reflection of hedge and lawn sits on the same pane as the fronds behind it. It looks a little untidy and actually does the building good.

Behind the house lies the lake, crossed by a low arched bridge, and beyond it a wooded hill, 48 metres at the main peak and 37 at the second. It did not grow there. It is hollow inside and holds exhibition rooms, an underground car park and a substation, with seven thousand trees on top. Two kilometres away stands the Chinese Expo pavilion of 2010, built for half a year and now an art museum. Not much gets demolished in this corner of Pudong. Getting up the hill, by the way, needs a booking through a mini program on your phone, and anyone who would rather not climb takes the lift.

Photographs: Supanut Arunoprayote, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.