Neri&Hu has designed a new performing arts space for Shanghai with 2,500 seats and a multipurpose space they feel will challenge ostentatious tropes latent in 21st-century iterations of the typology. 

Located in Shanghai’s busy Qiantan commercial area, the New Bund 31 Performing Arts Center shines as a cultural beacon amidst a forest of tall buildings. Neri&Hu chose to conceptualize its interior as an 'arena' in the Classical sense, arranging a stacked layer of arches to frame the venue’s performance space and five-story atrium.

The arches are repeated on the outside in bronze-toned cassettes lining the ground-level facade. Back inside, bronze is used again in the bathroom fixtures. Copper finishes line the elevators to floating balconied seating boxes, and the the VIP lounge made out of perforated bricks. 

Set against this is the design of a smaller black box exhibition space component that services the theater's MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions) functions. The architects say this is meant to display a literal notion of the "black box" itself using dark stainless steel as the main cladding material.

They add: "Throughout the project, [we] attempts to break away from the flashiness and noise commonly found in entertainment space design, rather to inject a museum-like quality through the use of tactile materials and archetypal forms. 'The Arena' becomes a venue that invites people to not only be visually and aurally stimulated, but also to be challenged intellectually."

The New Bund 31 center was completed in October of 2023. This is the firm's second cultural space in Shanghai following the New Shanghai Theater, which was completed in 2016. Another Blue Bottle chain café project was delivered in the city recently. Both Neri and Hu are scheduled to speak at the UCLA on November 25th as part of the AUD's Fall lectures series.