Humanitarian Acts

Studio Shanghai’s visionary founder Benjamin Wood eschews complicated flashiness to create urban environments that elevate the lives of inhabitants

- Diana Hubbell

Benjamin Wood was sitting at his desk in his Boston office when he got the call. Vincent Lo, a Hong Kong-based developer, was seeking a visionary architect for an unusual project in Shanghai. Lo had admired Wood’s work on Lincoln Road, a highend stretch of commercial development that had transformed a neighbourhood in Miami. Details of the project were vague, but the offer was too intriguing to turn down.

“He just said, ‘I have something in Shanghai I want you to look at,’” Wood remembers. “I had never been to China, but he was generous enough to buy me a first-class ticket, so I took him up on it.”

After a brief discussion with Lo in Hong Kong, Wood flew to the mainland for what turned out to be a fateful visit. It was 1998, a year after the handover in Hong Kong and right on the cusp of China’s meteoric building boom. The project in question turned out to be Xintiandi, the upscale, mixed-use development centred around a cluster of historic buildings that is now widely considered one of the country’s greatest urban planning success stories.

In an article for The New Yorker, architecture critic Paul Goldberger dubbed it “the most provocative new architectural project in Shanghai”—an especially bold proclamation in an era when Pudong’s skyline was rapidly approaching Blade Runner proportions.