In his two decades in China, architect Ben Wood has helped build over a dozen commercial projects that combine historic architectural styles with modern commerce—most famously in Shanghai’s buzzy Xintiandi area, where you can find a Shake Shack or a Tiffany’s housed in a 19th-century styled building.
Now Wood wants more of his fellow designers to ditch the glass and steel of modern buildings and embrace more traditional materials and designs. “Whether it’s natural stone, wood…what’s the most sustainable resource we have in this world right now?” Wood said last Thursday at Fortune China’s ESG Summit in Shanghai, China. These materials are “overlooked by the ‘50 Shades of Grey’ that high-rise architects are selling people in this room today.”
“Why buy ‘50 Shades of Grey’ when you can have color?” Wood said. “It’s not a stylistic issue, it’s a meaning issue, of what does that material mean?”
Jeff Haynes—AFP via Getty Images
Wood, who now runs Studio Shanghai, an architectural design firm based in the Chinese megacity, is famous for wanting to protect historic styles in his projects. The architect is perhaps best known for his work on Xintiandi, a high-rise shopping district near the city’s French Concession that opened in 2001, and the controversial 2003 redesign of Chicago’s Soldier Field, which preserved the external facade of the old stadium while renovating the interior.
Shanghai awarded the Xintiandi redevelopment contract to Hong Kong-based developer Shui On and its owner Vincent Lo on one condition: That the billionaire tycoon preserve some of the local architecture.
Wood remembers the need to preserve the area’s “shikumen” architecture, a unique blend of Chinese and Western styles from the mid-19th century. Upon…