"The facade is Art-deco and geometric," he points out, "yet in the centre there is a Moorish Middle-Eastern look. Across the street there is a power plant done in clean industrial style."
He insists that the development will have a very different demographic.
"We're not trying to turn it into a luxury zone. We want it to appeal to a broad section of people who come here to expand their innovations in terms of beauty, design and the things that fill out a person's existence."
"Creative workers need affluent, sophisticated buyers (I call this smart demand)," says John Howkins, chairman of John Howkins & Co, creative consultant and author of The Creative Economy.
"Shanghai needs lots of marketplaces where creative people can show and sell their work and locals can buy it. It needs both government-supported places, big development-supported places and artist-invented places. Some will succeed," he points out somewhat logically, "and some will fail."
Image: A construction worker stands on scaffolding before an advertising billboard outside a shopping mall in Shanghai | Photograph: Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images
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