Shanghai project wins top award for Best New Mega Development

As large-scale urban renewals worldwide grapple with balancing landmark ambitions and capital returns, a 55-billion-yuan ($7.74 billion) mega project in Shanghai has won a prestigious global award for excellence in large-scale development.

West Bund Central, a 1.8-million-square-meter multi-use complex along Shanghai's Huangpu River, has secured the 2024 MIPIM Asia Awards Gold Prize for Best New Mega Development.

Industry observers note that as large-scale urban renewals worldwide wrestle with the conflict between "landmark cost" and capital returns, West Bund Central — which bundles office, retail and cultural space into a new urban core — demonstrates that design intervention can compress cost, offering a replicable case study.

KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates), lead architect on the project, advanced the design through a "geometry + vision" refinement during the design development stage, in which KPF Architectural Designer Shen Tao played a key role.

By simplifying the curtain-wall terminations on the district's signature towers, Tao eliminated hundreds of custom components without compromising visual impact. The move directly trimmed the facade budget, unlocked cash-flow earlier and widened the leasing window.

Tao earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Wuhan University in China and his Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design (MSD-AAD) from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

Speaking from KPF's New York office, he said: "When global capital becomes increasingly cautious about mega-projects, it's essential for architects to incorporate cost control into their design language to ensure their creativity can truly be realized."

Within KPF, Tao led West Bund Central's tower envelopes, lobbies and crowns. For the hotel tower's skyline-defining top, he ran massing studies that balanced iconography and safety; the selected crown geometry became the basis for all subsequent designs. On the office towers, the team had struggled to reconcile clean lines, fabrication tolerances and cost. Tao built an independent parametric model that generated technical diagrams the facade consultant ultimately adopted as the construction set.

Tao's ethos now travels abroad. His concept for the New Aga Khan Museum of Islamic & Contemporary Art — developed as design lead — has just been named a 2025 NY Architectural Design Awards Gold Award winner.

To negotiate a balance between Islamic tradition and contemporary expression, Tao devised a "geometric growth" strategy: Classical Arabesque motifs algorithmically evolved into 2.5D studies, then resolved into a tectonically coherent 3D spatial structure. A gradient facade rhythm modulates light and shadow while merging seamlessly with the gallery circuit, deepening the cultural narrative.

It has been learned that as international investors tighten risk controls, Tao's "Geometric Optimization for Cost-Efficiency" philosophy could shape developer decision paths well beyond Shanghai.