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With a High-Tech Art Exhibition, the STJU School of Design Pays Tribute to the Centennial of Wukang Mansion!

Today, the Wukang Mansion is an elegant architectural landmark, as well as an “influencer” in its own right.

A hundred years ago, the former Normandie Apartment, as it was then known, served as a vivid stage upon which legendary stories unfolded.

As such, this past June, the faculty and students of the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University celebrated the birthday of the Wukang Mansion with a high-tech art exhibition in a historical villa.

The event was titled "Once upon a time in Shanghai: The Immersive exhibition of centennial Wukang Mansion," and marked the 100th anniversary of the completion of the Wukang Mansion. It recently opened at the Shanghai Old Villa Art Center on Wukang Road. Under the guidance of the Culture and Tourism Bureau of Xuhui District and Xufang Group, and with the support of Hengfu Investment, the exhibition was jointly developed by the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai DioNexus Culture and Technology Co., Ltd.

The event integrated cutting-edge technology with expertise in the arts and humanities, promoting the creativity of university students and teachers to serve society. It  served as a testament to innovating, inheriting, and transmitting Shanghai culture, Shanghai style, and Chinese culture.

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「The Story Behind " Once upon a time in Shanghai: The Immersive exhibition of centennial Wukang Mansion "」​

From research to market

From classroom to practice

Exploring a new model of green sustainable development

Nearly ten faculty and students from the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University served as the main creators of the project. Under the framework of government-enterprise-university cooperation, they actively promoted the transformation of academic work, launching a series of original works including historical research, spatial script, 3D digital modeling, and creative product design. From there, they successfully opened up a path from research to market, from classroom to society.

As one of the core display projects of the first "Shanghai Summer" International Consumer Season in 2024, the exhibition has received extensive social attention and a warm response. It is committed to innovating the inheritance of cultural heritage through the integration of cutting-edge technology, creating new scenes for urban cultural touristic consumption.

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Professor Xing Ruan, the academic advisor for the project, and Dean of the School of Design, holds the view that the urban center of Shanghai, with the Wukang Mansion as the focal point, exemplifies a unique "Chinese modern urban model." The distinctive livability of this model still holds significant value today. The architect of the Wukang Mansion, Laszlo Hudec, can also be regarded as a product of the era of Shanghai's internationalist spirit and an extension of the Shanghai-style culture, providing the academic community with original points and new discoveries. The "blending of the real and the virtual" in the living environment has been a part of Chinese culture since ancient times. Today's exploration not only carries forward and promotes Chinese cultural heritage but also stands at the forefront of future "new liberal arts" research.

As one of the core display projects of the first "Shanghai Summer" International Consumer Season in 2024, the exhibition has received extensive social attention and a warm response. It is committed to innovating the inheritance of cultural heritage through the integration of cutting-edge technology, creating new scenes for urban cultural touristic consumption.

The integration of cutting-edge technology and humanism

Making the building more "readable"

Realizing a unique way for activating the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage.

"Once upon a time in Shanghai" takes arts and humanities as the core of technology, letting cutting-edge technology elaborate humanistic research through more vivid forms. In the context of the convergence of concepts such as virtual-reality tourism, immersive theater, interactive games, and digital museums, leveraging technologies like VR and spatial computing, audiences can be transported back to the Wukang Mansion a century ago, visit the home of a female movie star in the 1930s, and follow the architect Laszlo Hudec to appreciate the historical transformation of the Heng-Fu Landscape Area from an aerial perspective, experiencing the endless charm of the century-old Shanghai-style urban culture.

As one of the first commercial VR-LBE projects in China with rigorous academic support, "Once upon a time in Shanghai" has, during its preliminary academic preparation, drawn on Professor Xing Ruan's team's long-term research on the urban and architectural history of Shanghai. The project has conducted in-depth studies on a series of historical images and documents related to the Wukang Mansion and modern Shanghai. It has fully restored the modern lifestyle under the influence of the Shanghai style a century ago in areas such as architectural design, furniture design, graphic design, and fashion design, resulting in an innovative outcome marking a significant academic achievement.

During the developing process, the project team collaborated with outstanding VR game companies, utilizing cutting-edge technologies, and successfully slowed for unlimited multi-person ambulation through large spaces through SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms. Subsequently, a series of digital asset developments were completed, including the creation of artistic scenes, programming frameworks, character production, and motion binding. Additionally, the team designed a rich gamified interactive experience, allowing audiences to explore the virtual world with a certain degree of freedom, including actions such as opening doors, discovering hidden Easter eggs, and making choices in plot branches, thereby further enhancing the project's entertainment value and playability.

As Professor Xing Ruan has stated, the integration of cutting-edge technology innovation with historical and cultural knowledge makes architecture truly "readable." This allows the general public to transcend mere photo-taking from outside and delve deeper into the internal spaces and lifestyles of buildings, transforming the "readability" of architecture into a genuine "experience." This approach has realized a unique method of revitalization for the preservation and inheritance of cultural heritage buildings, showcasing the future direction of combining the virtual and real worlds.

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Crossing boundaries,

Unleashing infinite innovation vitality,

Exploring the infinite possibilities of design.

Design education in the built environment at Shanghai Jiao Tong University can be traced back to the early twentieth century. In December 2017, the University grouped the design related disciplines scattered in different schools, and amalgamated three departments, Architecture, Design and Landscape Architecture, to establish the new School of Design. Their achievements in education, research, practice, social service and international reach have earned worldwide recognition. In the 2019 QS subject ranking, “Architecture and the Built Environment” at Shanghai Jiao Tong was ranked as the 50th in the world, and the ranking rose to 39 in 2023. The establishment of Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Design coincides with a momentous historical opportunity: the state-initiated strategic transformation from “Made in China” to “Designed in China”, and the municipality’s ambitious plan to turn Shanghai into a “Capital of Design” and a “Centre for Science and Technological Innovation”. Riding on a world-class platform, with high-calibre students and first-rate research, our vision is to become a global School of Design with a distinctive Shanghai Jiao Tong character, sustained by a community of talented scholars and design practitioners

​Project developers from the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University:

Academic Guidance | Ruan Xing

Academic Research | Huang Huaqing, Wang Hao, Cao Zitian

Art Main Creative | Huang Huaqing, Yan Jiahao

3D Scene Design | Yan Jiahao, Peng Di, Wang Yan, Ma Qun, etc.

Graphic Design | Li Yuchen, Yan Jiahao, etc.

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Yan Jiahao, a graduate student majoring in architecture in the 2023 class of the School of Design, says, "I participated in the project creation under the guidance of my mentor Huang Huaqing, and as a member of the founding team of Dionexus, the experience of project production has prompted me to step out of the traditional boundaries of architecture, trying various types of work such as script creation, game art, visual design, and post-operation. If a person is compared to an AI large model, what I am doing now is to turn the information input from various interests into a creative output after digestion by the discipline. From this perspective, interdisciplinary work may be an inevitable trend."

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Li Yuchen, an undergraduate student majoring in visual communication in the 2020 class of the School of Design, says, "this project combining technology and art has burst out with crystal vitality in the hands of the young team. As the main creative designer of the project's graphic vision and cultural and creative products, for me, 'doing something different in tourism cultural creation' is the intention of the design. Fortunately, this attempt at cultural and creative products has been recognized by many people, making me more convinced of the power of innovation."

Huang Huaqing, the chief director of the project, an associate professor at the School of Design, and a co-founder of DioNexus, says, "this is an integrated project that reflects the advantages of the School of Design's discipline matrix. We combine traditional architectural design with virtual reality design in the digital age, integrating the strengths of different majors such as architecture, visual communication, industrial design, and game design, forming a new type of urban cultural tourism experience with a deep academic foundation while also being popular with the public. This project has led to new research interests for me, and I also hope to create more results and employment directions for teachers and students of our university."

Since its opening, the project has attracted thousands of tourists every day to visit and experience in the VR experience area, academic exhibition area, and cultural and creative area. The project has been actively reported by mainstream media such as Liberation Daily, Wen Wei Po, Shanghai TV News, and more. A reporter from Liberation Daily wrote that the project is close to the "Z generation," offering a novel cultural experience, presenting the Wukang Mansion in a way that young people expect at the moment, promoting the continuation and innovation of the city's cultural context. Wen Wei Po praised the project for showing the living conditions and urban temperament of Shanghai, allowing the audience to put on VR glasses and open the "Shanghai Centennial Story Collection".

The project team aspires to use the Wukang Mansion as a starting point to further deepen the concept of "readable architecture." They aim for the Wukang Mansion to transcend being just an "internet-famous spot" and, with the power of the virtual world, become a cultural landmark that carries the century-old historical essence of Shanghai, a virtual museum that can be deeply read and experienced.