Shanghai’s international reputation as a hotspot for Art Deco received a major boost last month when it became the first Asian city to host the 13th World Congress of the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies (ICADS). In the decadent 1930s, under colonial rule, the Chinese city enjoyed a building boom that was Deco in style but informed by Chinese decorative arts traditions. Today, Old Shanghai is still associated with the bold, elegant, geometric lines of Art Deco. Despite two decades of haphazard demolitions of old structures, scores of original Art Deco buildings remain, including the Peace Hotel and the famous Paramount Hall ballroom.
“Shanghai has the most international collection of Art Deco in the world, with buildings designed by architects from the US, China, Hungary, Russia, France and the UK. It also has a unique hybrid of vernacular architecture—a Chinese Art Deco style that melds Eastern and Western elements,” says Tina Kanagaratnam, who helped to organise the congress, which is a biennial event. Kanagaratnam is also the founder of Shanghai Art Deco, an organisation that grew out of Historic Shanghai, which she set up in 1998 with her husband, Patrick Cranley, and the historian and fellow American ex-pat Tess Johnston. The group is planning an Art Deco Weekend in May 2016.
Although the congress (1-6 November) was not officially recognised by the Chinese government, local media coverage was enthusiastic, Kanagaratnam says. According to Sandra Cohen-Rose, a facilitator for ICADS and the president of Art Deco Montreal, previous congresses have increased government and community awareness of the potential prestige and tourist appeal of historic architecture. She says that the Cuban government stepped up its preservation efforts after the 2013 congress, and an Art Deco church in Montreal was restored after the 2009 event. “And look at Miami,” Cohen-Rose says of the city that hosted the first congress in 1991. “It has just taken off.”
Kanagaratnam says that Shanghai is “hands down” the best-preserved city in China, noting that students can even major in preservation studies at the city’s Tongji University. “The rest of Asia has plenty of examples of Art Deco,” she says, but this means that very few buildings are preserved. “Preservation [here] has come a long, long way… restorations are becoming more sympathetic, historically accurate and true to the spirit of the original. We hope that the international attention brought by the congress will show the importance of this style to a global audience and shine a spotlight on Art Deco preservation.”
Coinciding with the congress was a conference on the late Shanghai-based, Hungarian architect László Hudec (1893-1958), who designed several local Art Deco landmarks, including the Park Hotel. The event was staged by the Hungarian Consulate General in Shanghai, with the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute. The next ICADS congress is due to take place in the US in 2017, in Cleveland, Ohio.