There is an unsung architectural style in our midst. Writers in Shanghai have long noted the city’s art deco heriage with fervent glee, even writing fantastic books popularizing these buildings and their lavish Beaux Arts Bund cousins. Recently, the works of Hudec and other early 20th-century Shanghai architects have become the focus of new tomes, lectures and exhibitions. But there is nary a mention of another facet of our city’s pre-second world war past: the Edwardian style.
 
       Early 20th-century Edwardian represented a break with the Victorian era’s fussy over-decoration and dark interiors. Of course, in today’s landscape, Edwardian itself seems rather conservative and often play second fiddle to the more romantic revival styles. But still it lingers on in Shanghai and many other places around the world as a reminder of the last word in style around the turn of the 20th century.

        In Shanghai, the Edwardian style lasted long past the great War – until the early 1930s, in fact. At the time, the city was just starting to experience revolutionary challenges to the political status quo and things were still mightily conservative amongst the moneyed gentry. Harking back to stately neoclassical design elements therefore fit the mood of the upper classes, and the British, America, Japanese nd even well-off Chinese (who built more buildings that any other group in old Shanghai) tended to select historic styles like Edwardian.

       While Shanghai and other such outposts of overseas empires kept to conservative architecture, Continental Europe largely did an about-face. In the years before and immediately after the first world war, Europe began embracing modern design concepts that were to develop into groundbreaking styles like art deco, Bauhaus and cubism. It wasn’t until after Palmer & Tuner’s Egyptian-esque art deco Cathay Hotel (now the north wing of the Peace Hotel) that Shanghai turned with confidence to new styles.
 
       Most of the city’s Edwardian buildings were built as middle-class Chinese residences. Yes, we’re talking about the famed longtang, the Shanghainese buildings as Edwardian. First, the structures were usually constructed out of large red bricks, breaking the link to earlier Shanghai residences that were often made of the smaller gray bricks that were quarried locally. Second, the presence of fireplaces and wooden windows shows that the houses were warmed sparingly and imperfectly ( other residences of the time had steam radiator systems and steel-framed windows that wouldn’t warp with sustained heart in winter ). Next, and assort-mimicking architraves around windows and doors, were necessary to give the structure some detailing. Final telltale symbols were the X-like crosses and diamonds in the wooden window frames. Combined, these details give the longtang a stately, but never really beautiful, guise.
 
       It is interesting to note here that housing styles both before and after the Edwardian in Shanghai had many more characteristics that made them regionally Chinese. For example, the Comprador-style buildings of the 19th and early 20th-centuries would have seemed completely out of place in other parts of the world. Likewise, by the middle of the 1930s there were many buildings in Shanghai – the Bank of China on the Bund comes to mind styles. Perhaps this was due not only to the above-mentioned conservative nature o Shanghai buildings, but also to the spread of print and celluloid media during the 1920s.
 
       Check out examples of Shanghai’s Edwardian architecture by making your way to the middle of the city; to the residential areas that were developed in the 1920s. a swathe of Edwardian residences was recently demolished along the eastern flank of Shimen Yi Lu and parts of the old Chinese city to the west of Yuyuan; however, Nanchang Lu and Shanxi Bei Lu are still home to many Edwardian laneways. Fashions may change, but architecture has a wonderful tenacity to endure against the odds.