Text description provided by the architects. A few years ago, there were many old buildings being demolished in downtown Shanghai. Walking around the city’s streets, one often saw half-destroyed houses with some of their walls ripped off, exposing rooms with peeling wallpaper, faded pastel-coloured walls, rectangles of ceramic-tiles where bathrooms or kitchens were, ceilings with crumbling decorative rosettes or edged with mouldings, and an assortment of broken furniture too unworthy to be salvaged by the city’s army of scavengers. The effect was one of a visual collage of colours, textures and objects; a frozen montage of settings and scenes where lives seemed to have left in a hurry.
