Staging a World-class Creative Campus and Performance Space 
{"autoplay":"true","autoplay_speed":"8000","speed":"1000","arrows":"true","dots":"false","loop":"true","nav_slide_column":5,"rtl":"false"}
{"autoplay":"true","autoplay_speed":"8000","speed":"1000","arrows":"true","dots":"false","loop":"true","nav_slide_column":5,"rtl":"false"}

DETAILS

LocationShanghai, China
ClientStudios Architecture
Size17 acres

Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station and a park at a prominent edge of Shanghai. The project’s scheme integrates historic buildings, and provides an appropriate separation of public and performance spaces from private living and educational spaces as well as a functional and ceremonial arrival and drop-off area. At the large central plaza, a dramatic interactive fountain welcomes visitors and creates a sense of drama for public performances. The feature may be shut off to create outdoor space for larger public gatherings. The plaza provides access to the Center’s four new buildings, each with its own distinctive outdoor courtyard. Courtyards are carved into the landscape, with the new spaces offering a variety of experiences for learning and performance. In this new amenity for the public, curving bands of paving, along with rows of trees, hedges and promenades sweep through the landscape, where seating and water features welcome visitors from the surrounding city.

Related Projects

Stanford West Apartments

SWA placed a special emphasis on maintaining the riparian corridor with native planting, using consideration when dealing with the archaeologically sensitive areas of the site, as well as existing recreation trails and landscape amenities such as parks and play areas. The internal street grid and architectural and landscape elements are designed to recall the ...

College of Marin Center for Student Success

Named for the College of Marin’s former 13-year superintendent, the new Dr. David Wain Coon Center for Student Success serves as the campus centerpiece along College Avenue. In collaboration with architects Group 4 and HMC, the college’s new library and study center reimagines a previously unwelcoming campus edge by transforming it into an open and...

Cañada College Kinesiology & Wellness

In collaboration with ELS, SWA designed a new landmark for Canada College: the Kinesiology & Wellness Center.  The project replaced a windowless 1960s-era gym building and outdoor asphalt yard with the glassy new building and infinity pool deck on this hilltop campus with fantastic views.  The project also created a new campus arrival and ceremonial overlo...

Northwest Vista College

Northwest Vista College is situated in the oak covered hills west of San Antonio, with beautiful views toward the city and surrounding valley. Previously the design team completed an extensive master plan that accommodated for the expansion of the college facilities to three times its current size. The design seeks to sensitively integrate the nearly 400,000 s...

Soka University

When Japan-based Soka Gakkai International, one of the world’s largest lay Buddhist organizations, decided to establish a fully accredited liberal arts university in southern Orange County, SWA joined with the architects to create a setting that expresses the goals of the new university. Soka means “to create value” and the ideal of Soka education is to foster...

Stanford Campus Center

Stanford University Facilities Project Management. Cody Anderson Wasney Architects. The addition of the Campus Center required historic renovation, seismic retrofit and a new addition to mark this important intersection of the campus. Specimen elm, cedar, cypress and Japanese black pine provided the overall setting and the design worked to preserve these impor...

Stanford Toyon Hall

Toyon Hall, a significant historic building originally designed by Bakewell and Brown Architects in 1922, is a three-story structure centered around a magnificent formal courtyard with arcades and arches. The purpose of the project was to preserve, maintain and enhance the building and site. SWA scope of work included evaluation of existing site conditions and...

UCSD Ridge Walk North Living & Learning Neighborhood

UCSD Ridge Walk Living & Learning Neighborhood provides modern living spaces for over 2,400 undergraduate students alongside updated academic spaces, student amenities, and shared commons.

Housing updated administrative and teaching facilities for Thurgood Marshall College, the School of Global Policy and Strategy, and the Department of Economics in...