1000 Trees, Shanghai

1 · POSITION

1000 Trees is a mixed-use development on Suzhou Creek in Shanghai’s Putuo district, beside the M50 arts district and a public park, designed by Heatherwick Studio for Tian An China Investments. Its first phase opened with a lighting ceremony on 22 December 2021 after eight years in development. It is entered for its programme as much as its form: offices, shops, galleries, a school and hotel bedrooms in one planted landscape. [1, 2]

2 · A GRID MADE INTO A HILLSIDE

The studio began not with the façade but with the building’s grid of a thousand structural columns, and turned the top of every column into a planter. The result is a stepped pair of what the studio calls man-made mountains, carrying more than seventy species of tree, cut through on the south side like termite mounds to show the life inside. The columns that would be hidden in any other building are the thing the visitor sees. [1, 2]

3 · WHAT IT HOLDS

The full development runs to 300,000 square metres on a six-hectare site. Restaurants, museums and galleries share it with several historic buildings kept from the site, including the bell tower of an old flour factory, which becomes a sightseeing lift. Heatherwick was appointed in 2011, the year after its UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. [1, 2]

4 · WHY A RETAIL BUILDING IS IN A REGISTER OF PLACES

The register files it with the mixed-use complexes that are visited for themselves. A shopping building that sets out to be a park, on an industrial creek beside an arts district, is the same proposition the historic market makes: come for the place, and the buying follows. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ A second, taller phase with hanging gardens was under construction at the 2021 opening and expected two years later; its completion is not established. The studio dates the project complete in 2021 while describing the whole programme, which the phased opening contradicts. Hotel bedrooms are listed in the programme; no hotel by name is identified in the sources read. [1–2]