SPARCH Architects, in charge of the master plan for Shanghai's new cruise-ship terminal, has released renderings of its
crown jewel: a collection of pod-like restaurants and bars suspended by cables from a 130-foot-high, glass-clad archway. The
so-called "Shanghai Chandelier" was designed in part in response to some Shanghai city planners' desire to open up the
notoriously jam-packed city in anticipation of the 2010 Expo, themed around "Better City, Better Life." Lifting the restaurants
off the ground might crowd the skyline, but it offers views through the arch to a new waterfront park.
That park is there because most of the $260 million, 2.8 million-square-foot terminal isn't there: it's underground. The terminal
master plan involves a network of courtyards carved into the landscape with buildings sunk into them. The first construction
phase finished in October, and the entire terminal is set to open in May, in time for the Expo.
With a terminal this enormous, China is betting that the cruise industry booms in Asia. It's been growing--Royal Caribbean
started to operate out of Dubai in January with cruises around the Middle East and Shanghai saw more than 100 ships dock in
2007, up from only 10 in 2004--but the new terminal might be overly ambitious. About 150,000 cruise tourists came through
the port in 2008. The new terminal is built to handle a yearly load of 1.5 million. Will it have to? It's designed around 88,000-ton
ships--huge, but not as big as behemoths like Royal Caribbean's 220,000-ton Oasis of the Seas. (That ship needed
a new terminal at Port Everglades, Florida designed just for it.) That's because the Shanghai terminal's site on the Huangpu River
isn't that great a port for these giant new ships. The biggest of the big can't even get to the terminal because the river is too
narrow and the Yangpu Bridge over it is too low for them to fit under. Most big ships, then, go to Hong Kong, or another port on
the mouth of the Yangtze, outside of Shanghai. Royal Caribbean says it'll use smaller, "intimate cruise ships" in the new
port--a fitting oxymoron for a city bent on balancing smart urbanism with boomtown extravagance.
（转自FastCompany.com）
