Text description provided by the architects
The Wanhangdu Road frontage of Shanghai Zhongshan Park has been comprehensively upgraded by opening the historic 150-year-old garden to the city. The project emerged from a simple brief: open Zhongshan Park. The northern edge along Wanhangdu Road is defined by ancient plane trees, the English-style Second Gate and the elegant historic Copper Pavilion - a century of layered character. But dense tree cover and a long perimeter wall had sealed the park off: the Second and Third Gates were dark and unrecognisable, the road mixed motor and non-motor traffic on a narrow pavement, and veteran trees conflicted with new public-space demands. The design principle was to respect every tree and every inch of historic fabric. The entire wall along Wanhangdu Road was removed, releasing hidden landscape and dissolving the boundary between park and neighbourhood. Mature trees were retained as far as possible, dense mid-storey planting was thinned, declining specimens removed, and new understory shrubs added. The Second and Third Gates were redesigned around their plane trees and the English gate building. At the Third Gate, a century-old plane named "Lonely Tree Braving Frost" had been hidden by walls and buildings for years; once revealed, it needed no companions, so a simple sixty-centimetre-high rail protects it as a standing artwork. A curvilinear loop draws pedestrians from both directions into the park, and vintage lattice tiles salvaged from an old pergola are reused in paving and landscape walls. An L-shaped, cold-steel pergola with triangular grates frames a quiet view back to the plane tree, seating inside and an abstract goose-yellow logo outside. The pavement was moved into the park itself, curving around every root of the veteran trees; multi-coloured granite squares jointed with white cement, bordered by low railings that become light strips at night. The public toilet along the route was reclad in weathering-steel vertical grilles that shift in appearance as one walks past. At the Second Gate, facing East China University of Political Science and Law, two contrasting gardens - one raised mound with ornamental grasses around existing trees, one flat garden of themed flower beds - form a "seed garden" that invites students in. A new tram waiting shelter with repeated arches and columns integrates the Route 20 trolley terminus, and an arched "coal-gas pavilion" for overhead-wire maintenance becomes a small English-style tower. Across 16,000 square metres, completed in September 2022, the project argues that a century-old park should be updated through restraint rather than ornament, letting the city flow into the garden and vice versa.
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