A tale of the new and the old: renovation of Yong’an Warehouse at Yangpu waterfront, Shanghai

Abstract

The urban riverside space of Shanghai is transforming. How to renovate industrial heritage buildings to renew their vitality while retaining their historical memories and integrate them into the contemporary cityscape and today’s urban lifestyle is a common challenge encountered by contemporary architects. This article takes the renovation of Yong’an Warehouse as an example to showcase a typical heritage conservation project’s design process. The architects took different approaches to accommodate the different statuses of the twin buildings of the Yong’an Warehouse, seeking to create a symbiotic twin relationship between the past and the present. This project adopted a conservation and utilisation approach that involves multilateral participation, emphasising value-oriented mythology, and providing an alternative thread for the renovation of historical architecture.