Apple Jing’an is a new Apple store and urban regeneration project that opened at the end of March and was designed by Foster + Partners. Located in the heart of Shanghai’s Jing'an District, except for the Apple store in New York, this one is the second-largest global flagship and the biggest in Asia.

A new circular public plaza has been carefully recreated to enhance connectivity between the historic Jing’an Temple and Jing’an Park, which are located on either side of Nanjing Road. The project knits together the city’s urban fabric with the major metro interchange below to create a new active public space for the city of Shanghai.
The permeable new plaza connects different pedestrian flows across multiple levels and includes a gently sloping landscaped skywalk, which integrates an elevated gallery with terraced seating for the public to enjoy views of the temple. The plaza’s circular geometry encourages social interactions and reinforces a sense of community to create a new gathering space in the city. Seasonal planting has been integrated within the hardscape spaces to complement the warm tones of the temple and soften the urban edges. The regionally sourced Padang Light stone on the plaza flows through the interior to line the walls and floor of the store, creating a seamless transition from outside to inside.
 
“We are delighted to have been given this great responsibility to create this transformative project for Shanghai. Our design reimagines the original plaza as a vibrant new public space, which provides places to sit and relax, drawing people in and respectfully enhancing the setting for the beautiful Jing’an Temple.”
Stefan Behling, Head of Studio, Foster + Partners.

The store itself is nestled within an existing structure below Jing’an Park, with its main entrance on the plaza. Visitors descend from the plaza into the Forum, a bright double-height space, via a central stone staircase. This dramatic arrival sequence is replicated when people enter the store via the underground metro interchange, which directly connects to the double-height space of the store via curved ramps to improve accessibility.

The large disc-shaped central light in the ceiling above the Forum is illuminated by a large backlit panel that simulates daylight using tunable white lighting technology. As night descends, the intensity of light shifts to a warmer tone to mimic the ambient lighting. Additional lighting layers include accent lighting for products and wall-washers along the store’s perimeter.

A spectacular undulating timber ceiling follows the store’s circular geometry, wrapping around a central oculus and gently sloping upwards towards the main entrance, to bring in natural light from the plaza. The circular plaza, store entrance, interior staircase and Forum are all aligned on the central axis of the temple, offering direct views of the historic landmark from the inside and along each point of the journey between the different spaces.

The new development is respectful to both the temple and the park – which have their own distinct identities. The project aims to preserve these qualities and enhance their context, creating a complementary and natural addition to the surrounding urban realm.

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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