TANK SHANGHAI SHANGHAI OPEN ARCHITECTURE^65charge admission).
Tanks 1 and 2, which have street entrances,
have been refitted to become a restaurant and
a performingarts venue. Tanks 3 and 5 are
converted to galleries for painting and
sculpture and retain the original round con
figuration; the architects designed spiraling
ramps and staircases encased in painted metal
walls to provide dramatic entries to those
areas. In Tank 4, OPEN built a multistory
steelframe cube to house Qiao’s office plus
entertainment spaces, as well as halls that
have permanently flat walls suitable for more
conventional art display. In the rectilinear
underground halls connecting the tanks,
reinforcedconcrete columns, placed about 30
feet apart, support the concrete roof and the
expanse of greenery above.
Li, a former partner in New York at Steven
Holl Architects, trained at China’s elite
Tsinghua University in Beijing, then did
graduate studies at Rice University in
Houston.
Upon returning to China in 2008, Li led