The Riverside Building on Suzhou Creek
2 min readThe Riverside Building is located to the northwest of Sichuan Road Bridge, along the northern bank of Suzhou Creek. Completed in 1935, the nforced concrete building boasts a total area of 54,200 square meters.
With 282 apartments, occupants may enjoy a variety of scenic views of Suzhou Creek. The building follows an “pattern similar to the river and is known as ” the first apartment building in Asia”. Most of the residents at the time were foreigners from Britain, Spain, Port
ugal, and others note,in1938-1939 during the peak years of the influx of Jewish refug 8-19 several floors of the build-ing into district stay until they found other accommodation in the Hongkou distric The Normandy Apartments, now known as Wukang Mansions, before 1949 Wukang Mansions, formerly known as the Normandy Apartments, in the late 20th century.
In 1924, the International Savings Society, a French group, invested their funds into constructing an apartment building on Ferguson Road and Avenue Joffre (now Wukang Road and Huaihai Road, respectively). The eight-story reinforced concrete building sports a French Renaissance facade and covers an area of 1, 580 square meters. The build-ing was designed by the famous Hungarian architect Laszlo Hudec, who used the triangle plot created by the intersec-tion of the two roads as the inspiration for the building’s form. The building’s interior features arched openings that produce open and uninterrupted corridors, thereby compensating for their relative narrowness. The Normandy’s first tenants were mostly the foreign staff of the tramcar and water utility companies.
