Why go
The city rewards looking at materials and forms. Shikumen combine Chinese courtyard-house traditions with European details, while the Bund’s banks and hotels show early twentieth-century commercial confidence. Across the river, Pudong turns tall buildings into a changing skyline, so even a short river crossing becomes a useful design comparison.
The full story
Shanghai’s built character comes from repeated contrasts. Shikumen, or stone-gate houses, combine Chinese domestic patterns with details introduced through the treaty-port city. The Bund records a period when foreign banks, trading houses and hotels lined the Huangpu in classical, neoclassical and Art Deco forms. Elsewhere, temples keep a different scale: courtyards, tiled roofs, halls and pagodas set an inward rhythm beside busy streets. The 1930s added a notable Art Deco layer, visible in buildings such as the former Cathay Hotel. Pudong changed the view again after 1990, with towers shaped for a financial district rather than a historic waterfront. Compare the two banks and Shanghai becomes less a single style than a sequence of eras. Look for the shift from carved stone and tiled roofs to glass, steel and engineered height.