© Jiaxi Yang & Zhu Zhe

The dystopias that J.G. Ballard imagined could well have been set in the Shanghai where he was born. With its babelic chaos, vertiginous pace, and constant mutation, the economic capital of the Asian giant is one of the world’s new frontiers, a metropolis with eyes on the future but in which a rich history also palpitates. Lyndon Neri and Rosana Hu decided to establish their practice amid this reality, and learn from it to produce works that pursue order without ignoring their urban and cultural contexts, as shown by the six buildings featured in the following pages, thanks to which the spirit of their cosmopolitan city spreads to the rest of China.