#giga-shanghai

#giga-shanghai

The Goddess escalator, which takes almost 21 minutes to ascend, is almost certainly the world's largest of its kind, cutting through the center of Wushan and rising straight into the sky.

The design team combined the requirements for an accessible bridge and a small pavilion into a single structure, creating a unified architectural gesture that supports both movement and gathering.

Chen pays just 1200 RMB, or $168, a month for her apartment in faux Venice in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. It's so cheap that it's allowed Chen to retire at the tender age of 28. Experts say Chen is part of a broader trend that has seen a growing number of young people across China migrating to small towns and cities, taking advantage of cheap real estate prices that have been plummeting since the COVID pandemic.

Turn the circular base, and the whole structure begins to respond, gears catching one another as movement travels upward through its stacked layers. The form borrows from a celebration cake, with layered rings rising one above the other, soft in appearance yet precise in construction. Inside, one tier moves forward, and the next reverses, creating a continuous back-and-forth rhythm.

The design by 1Y Architects approaches this silence as material rather than absence. Instead of clearing the debris scattered across the site, the team gathered bricks, concrete fragments, and broken tiles from former factory buildings. These remnants form the structural fabric of the sound museum itself.

The Cloud Tower completes the existing Kingdee software park in Shenzhen's Nanshan neighborhood, which is an emerging tech district. Located on the edge of a green strip, the 211-meter-high tower provides space for offices, conferences, and a restaurant for Kingdee, a leading provider of enterprise management cloud services globally.

One veteran biologist said it was the most positive freshwater conservation story he had seen anywhere in the world in 20 years. It is really fantastic news. It is one of the first times that we can say that government measures have not just worked, but have really improved things, said Sebastien Brosse, of the University of Toulouse in France.

In case you didn't get the memo, everyone is feeling very Chinese these days. Across social media, people are proclaiming that "You met me at a very Chinese time of my life," while performing stereotypically Chinese-coded activities like eating dim sum or wearing the viral Adidas Chinese jacket. The trend blew up so much in recent weeks that celebrities like comedian Jimmy O Yang and influencer Hasan Piker even got in on it. It has now evolved into variations like " Chinamaxxing" (acting increasingly more Chinese) and " u will turn Chinese tomorrow " (a kind of affirmation or blessing).

Open source - that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy. Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models and broad deployment to spread AI's gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants. Speaking at a Davos panel on China's "AI+ Economy" strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country's approach reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

A worker sweeps the track at the National Stadium during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which was disrupted by heavy rain. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images The secret weapon is a network of capillary-like tubes that weave through the Bird's Nest's outer lattice, which are specifically designed to siphon away rainfall. The pipes channel rainwater into one of three underwater storage tanks, where it is filtered and prepared for recycling within the building.

A decade ago, China's political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from "Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands." This is the difference, they wrote, between "Made in China" and "Created in China." At WIRED, we never take what the government (ours or anybody else's) says at face value.

Century Square has always occupied a strategic position in Shanghai's urban sequence, acting as a hinge between major civic and waterfront destinations. Historically characterized by night lights, shows, and commercial presentations, the site demanded a redesign that could maintain its performative identity while broadening its social and environmental role. The proposal by the team at EMBT retains the capacity of the square for spectacle but shifts its emphasis toward flexibility and daily use.

Drawing Architecture Studio presents The Clock House No.2 at the 7th Shenzhen Bay Public Art Season in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on view until April 19th, 2026. Commissioned for the public art program, the Beijing-based practice reinterprets the historical automaton clock as architecture, using low-cost industrial components to construct a structure that chimes and glows every fifteen minutes. Where the clocks once gifted to emperors represented technical virtuosity and expensive craftsmanship, this installation adopts a deliberately rough and economical construction.

The project is structured around a single continuous hanging rail that extends for nearly 100 meters, serving as both the primary display system and the organizing element of the space. In response to the constraints of the site, the design reconsiders the hanging rail as a spatial device rather than a fixed retail fixture. The rail adapts to existing walls, columns, and building services, bending, rising, and shifting in section as needed to navigate obstacles.