The Union Building is a building on

the Bund The Bund or Waitan (, Shanghainese romanization: ''Nga3thae1'', , ) is a waterfront area and a protected historical district in central Shanghai. The area centers on a section of Zhongshan Road (East Zhongshan Road No.1) within the former Shang ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. It is located at No. 3, the Bund (formerly no. 4). Completed in 1916, the building was used by a number of insurance companies. The six-storey building was the first work in

of P&T Architects and Surveyors (Palmer & Turner), and was the first building in Shanghai to use a steel structure. The building occupied 2241 square metres, with a floor area of 13760 square metres. Because it had a narrow frontage onto the Bund, the main door was located on the adjacent Guangdong Road. The building is in

Neo-Renaissance Renaissance Revival architecture (sometimes referred to as "Neo-Renaissance") is a group of 19th century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range o ...

style with a symmetrical facade, but with some

Baroque style The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

details. The roof features a domed corner pavilion. In 1937, the

Japanese Imperial Army The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor o ...

threatened

. Being unable to indemnify war damages, the insurance companies had their assets frozen. The Union Bank then purchased the building. In 1949 the Union Bank evacuated from

in the wake of the Communist takeover. From 1953 the building was used by the Shanghai Civil Architecture and Design Institute. In 1997 a private equity fund from

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

purchased the building, and in 2004 converted it to a shopping centre, called "Three on the Bund". The restoration was led by American architect

Michael Graves Michael Graves (July 9, 1934 – March 12, 2015) was an American architect, designer, and educator, as well as principal of Michael Graves and Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. He was a member of The New York Five and the Memphis Grou ...

who meticulously restored the Beaux-Arts facade, reinforced the structure, and installed new building systems. He hailed his efforts as a model of

adaptive reuse Adaptive reuse refers to the process of reusing an existing building for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for. It is also known as recycling and conversion. Adaptive reuse is an effective strategy for optimizing the o ...

and won the 2006 design in Asia award.

References

External links

Three on the Bund

{{Shanghai Bund Buildings and structures completed in 1916 Buildings and structures in Shanghai Landmarks in Shanghai The Bund 1916 establishments in China