A stroll around Hudec’s Shanghai
While Shanghai’s Pudong business district may be home to the city’s most breathtaking examples of contemporary architecture, the city is also defined by a wealth of earlier Chinese and Western architectural styles that have made their architects household names.
From 19th century Shanghai shikumen to the turn of the 20th century British and French-style villas to the art deco mansions of the city’s Xuhui district in the 1920s and ’30s, these architectural tours de force of old have become living cultural symbols of the city.
During Spring Festival, I tried to catch as many of Shanghai’s architectural sights as possible, and found out more about one architect in particular — the Hungari- an-Slovak architect Laszlo Hudec, who designed some of the city’s most notable landmarks between 1918 and 1940, including the Park Hotel, the Grand Theater, and the Normandie Apartments.
The Park Hotel (1934), Hudec’s 22-story art deco masterpiece on Nanjing Road, defined the Shanghai skyline for decades, remaining the city’s tallest structure until the 1980s. The epitome of Shanghai’s golden era style, the building was inspired by the streamlined simplicity and vertical aspirations of American art deco rather than the fading French style.
A small museum on the second floor of the hotel shows how Hudec’s style evolved and matured, developing from eclectic neoclassicism to art deco to modernism, and also tells the remarkable story of how he came to live in Shanghai.
After studying architecture in Budapest, Hudec joined the Austro-Hungarian army after the outbreak of World War I, but was captured by Russian troops in 1916 and sent to a Siberian prison camp. During his transfer, he escaped from a train near the Chinese border and made his way to Shanghai, where he set up his own practice in 1925 after a stint at a United States’ architectural firm.
The US influence is clear in his mid-30s work, and the Park Hotel owes no small debt to Howells and Hood’s American Radiator Building. But while the Normandie shares the wedge-shape of New York’s Flatiron Building (1902), it draws more from the French-Renaissance style to honor the French navy’s World War I-era class of battleships.
Completed in 1924, the building demonstrates the architect’s ability to work within a challenging footprint, as does his nearby Avenue Apartments (1932). Hudec arranged the penthouse suites over the building’s most southerly corner, which resembles a ship’s bow. The property was later sold and renamed Wukang Mansion in 1953, attracting many film stars and artists to live there.
And on a rainy afternoon, it was apparent that the building has lost none of its charm. Eminently stylish yet clearly functional, the foyer still oozes art deco charm, from the half-clock dials above its elevators to its galleried arcade.
Hudec left China in 1947 after serving as Shanghai’s Hungarian honorary consul during the years of Japanese invasion, settling in California up until his death in 1958. The man who created China’s most enduring skyscraper died at the age of 65 from a heart attack induced by an earthquake. Yet his legacy endures: many of the 60 or so buildings he designed stand to this day.