Strategic Intervention
Shanghai, China
Fall 2025 Thesis
Advised by Emma Silverblatt & Jose Castillo
Independent Project
The official story of Shanghai’s growth is one of efficiency and ambition. But another story – more fractured, quieter, and at times, erased – runs alongside it. The speed of change flattened not only old buildings but the communities and cultures that once animated them. Historic neighborhoods were walled off and demolished within days, their residents relocated and dispersed. This top-down model of urbanization, defined by state-led planning and singular visions of progress, left little room for the subtleties of lived experience. Meanwhile, the tightly knit nongtang communities – with their alleyways, shared courtyards, and collective rhythms – represented a more bottom-up, informal mode of urban life. These spaces weren’t part of the future Shanghai imagined by planners, so they were cleared, paved over, and replaced with sanitized, homogenous versions of “modernity.”
But not everything disappeared. In the cracks of these rapid transformations, spaces emerged that defied easy categorization. Artist enclaves like M50 in Shanghai or 798 in Beijing were born not out of official mandate but through grassroots occupation and adaptation. These were urban leftovers; old factories, abandoned lots – reimagined into zones of creativity, resistance, and community. They embodied an alternative form of authorship, where the city wasn’t imposed from above but crafted from below.
This thesis is a response to that tension. It begins with the belief that architecture is not neutral. It can either reinforce dominant systems or help carve out space for those left behind. In exploring the collision between top-down urban planning and bottom-up cultural production, this project asks: How can architecture operate in the gaps of the system? How can we support informal, resilient communities not by designing for them, but with them, or at the very least, around them? In a city constantly reinventing itself, what would it mean to design for survival, not spectacle?
01: Art in Shanghai
02: West Bund Demolition
04: Trends
1. Precarity:
At risk of being displaced, demolished, or shut down, whether permenatnely or temporarily
2. Government Intervention:
The government’s secretive plans to consolidate power that the user is not privy to but can significantly influence the user’s life
3. Economic Pressures:
The government’s secretive plans to boost economic growth that the user is not privy to but can significantly influence the user’s life
4. Displacement:
A 6 month notice, or less, to cease all operations.
5. Non-Institutional Art Spaces
Venues that operate outside of traditional, formal institutions like state-run museums, commercially backed galleries, or large scale cultural foudnations
Artist run spaces, independent, self-funded galleries, squatted or temporary art spaces, pop-up exhibitions, digital art platforms, hybrid or informal art spaces
6. Resilience
The ability to continue operations elsewhere after being displaced
06: Intervention
07: Barge 06_The Office of Lost Futures
Barge 06: The Office of Lost Futures is a floating archive dedicated to the erased, the censored, and the never-realized. It houses floor plans of unbuilt museums, audio recordings of evicted artists, and design proposals that were either rejected or dismantled before they saw light. This vessel does not present a triumphant vision of progress. Rather, it offers a melancholic counter-history. Visitors are invited to explore architectural fragments and bureaucratic debris, engaging with interviews, speculative narratives, and unrealized futures that were cast aside in Shanghai’s relentless urban churn.
Positioned near newly constructed cultural flagships, this barge functions as a spatial foil to the city’s gleaming institutions. Where those spaces celebrate success and spectacle, the Office for Lost Futures documents the silences — the moments of potential that were never permitted to materialize. Its architecture is closed and opaque from the outside, resisting visual consumption, while its interior unfolds like a forensic archive. This barge questions the narratives that dominate Shanghai’s cultural memory, offering instead a space for reflection, mourning, and collective imagination.