At the heart of East Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s most recognisable pedestrian corridor, Century Square has been reimagined as a new urban landscape where ecology, spectacle and public life converge. Designed by EMBT in collaboration with Tongji University Architectural Design and Research Institute, the renewed square continues a long tradition of performances, events and public gatherings while introducing a more interactive relationship with the city around it.
Positioned between People’s Square and The Bund, Century Square has always occupied a strategic place within Shanghai’s urban theatre. Its identity has been shaped by crowds, commercial displays, night-time illumination and the constant movement of one of the city’s most active public spaces.
The new design begins with the city’s name itself. Shanghai, traditionally understood as “upon the sea”, becomes the conceptual starting point for an architecture inspired by the image of a shell opening to reveal a pearl.
That pearl is the new kaleidoscopic structure at the centre of the square.
Its reflective façades behave like a shifting surface of water, breaking apart and recomposing the world around them. Colourful paving, new greenery, commercial lights and the historic buildings of the city are reflected, fragmented and returned as a constantly changing image.
The structure is both stage and spectacle. It hosts performances, but also becomes one itself, an object animated by the city it reflects.
Century Square does not simply offer Shanghai another public space. It creates a new way of seeing the city: in fragments, in reflections, in movement, and in the endless transformation of light.
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Photo: (c) Runzi Zhu