Shimao Festival City, shopping mall renovation in Shanghai

Shimao Festival City: Beyond Shopping Mall, Reconnecting Back to the City

After winning global acclaim for both K11 in Shanghai, as well as Beijing's COFCO Plaza, Kokaistudios once again brings its expertise in shopping mall renovation to China’s increasingly lifestyle-driven retail scene. The firm's recent renovation of Shimao Festival City in Shanghai illustrates this contemporary crossroads, and demonstrates how by expanding malls’ functionality and reconsidering circulation, these sizeable structures can be reabsorbed by the city as useful public spaces of engagement and exchange.

Built in 2006, Shimao Festival City is a modern monument of Shanghai. Comprising retail, hotel and office space, it is located at the top of Shanghai’s famous East Nanjing Road shopping street, with views across nearby People’s Square. But despite its prime location the mall had fast become overlooked by residents in favor of venues more clearly aligned with their contemporary city lifestyle.

Kokaistudios was tasked with upgrading the pre-existing retail component of Shimao Festival City. By reconfiguring circulation both inside and outside the facility, identifying clear pathways according to visitor type, and creating openness and space, since renovations concluded in November 2018, the mall has helped reinvigorate a prime corner of Shanghai real estate. In doing so, it has placed the mall firmly on the radar of both residents as well as tourists, reconnecting it to the city.

Kokaistudios’ design concept is a theater and the renovation centers on visitor flow of three “roles” of users: tourists, audience and actors, with areas of the mall imagined as the foyer, auditorium, and backstage of a theater. Starting from outside, an external ‘red carpet’ guides visitors along a sky escalator extending from Nanjing Dong Lu to a third-floor balcony and podium entrance space. From here, visitors may access a second external escalator, taking them to another covered balcony on the fifth floor.

Tourists: Created primarily with tourists in mind, the red carpet guides visitors on an experiential journey. Effectively circumnavigating the mall proper, the “red carpet” offers impressive views across East Nanjing Road and People’s Square; they reinstate an original intention of the architecture itself, particularly with regard to its diagonal axis. It also sees the mall’s functionality expand to that of tourist attraction, reestablishing Shimao Festival City as a public space for enjoying all facets of Shanghai life - not just shopping.

In addition to softening the perimeter of the formerly enclosed mall, and physically reconnecting the architecture to its environs, the intervention repositions the mall’s focal point to its upper levels. Where previously access to the mall's core was exclusively via its ground floor flagship stores, Kokaistudios’ solution transports visitors directly to its re-centred and newly opened-up third-floor ‘foyer’, bringing energy and movement to the facility’s formerly under-visited upper levels.

Audience: Positioning the mall as a lifestyle destination that extends beyond retail was also key to attracting a second target demographic: Shanghai residents, imagined here as ‘audience.’ For this reason, the renovated mall features several high-end restaurants and bars on its fifth and sixth floors. With this in mind, a newly created street-level entrance opens onto an attractive atrium: flanked with vertical wooden boards, seemingly extending the entirety of the mall's height and interspersed with LED columns, it lends light, openness, and drama to what was previously an under-optimized space. From here, banks of elevators take diners directly to F&B outlets, without the need to navigate escalators.

Actors: Another entrance on East Nanjing Road caters to a third demographic, defined by Kokaistudios as ‘actors’ and imagined as those working in nearby offices. In order to facilitate frequent, more convenient use of Shimao Festival City, an escalator conveys this group direct to the heart of the mall. Envisaged as a ‘backstage' space, it sets an industrial tone through grey louver walls, polished black glass. These elements combine to reinforce the space’s efficiency and purpose, and contrasts with the mall’s more tourist-oriented outer areas.

Kokaistudios’ project demonstrates how architectural renovation can serve cities by retrofitting outdated shopping malls with the lifestyle elements of now, and flexibility for the future. In this way, these large-scale structures can be absorbed back into the useful fabric of urban centers. In the case of Shimao Festival City, this translates to optimizing and opening-up a formerly overlooked space in the heart of Shanghai for the benefit, enjoyment and use of all.