Reflective Nostalgia

Alternative Futures
for Shanghai's Shikumen Heritage
Harvard Graduate School of Design

Studio for Fall 2019
STU-1309 Reflective Nostalgia
Instructors: Neri & Hu

Bathhouse - Center Bath

This proposal for an alternative future for Shanghai’s Shikumen Heritage includes a hotel above ground and an underground bathhouse as machines of memories. The new program is about setting the founding ground; a bathhouse that constructs a heterotopia and places of bringing back memories. New forms of bathrooms are created by carving and subtracting, creating a sense of grotto. The place that the two programs (hotel + bathhouse) connect is
the ground floor which functions as a threshold and an in between space between the two. The floor is carved in the same way as the floor and ceiling of the underground floor.

Nostalgic memories, which are the ones missing, should be visible and will be the ones that will continue existing. Nostalgic memories will be identified in the morphology of the new form of the hotel, as the element of the pitched roof of the typology of the Lilong won’t be replaced but it will be transformed.

Bathhouse - Entrance

Bathhouse - Common Bath

Bathhouse - Common Bath

Bathhouse - Individual Bath

Private Room - Level +02