Water Tower Home transformation: bottom-up urban regeneration through a reality TV show

The article examines Wutopia Lab’s transformation of the Water Tower Home (shuita zhijia, also know as ‘House on the House’), a top-floor unit of a residential building converted from a water tower located in a Bulinli lilong neighbourhood in Shanghai. In 2015, the top-floor unit was transformed into a three-bedroom apartment, which was featured in a popular reality TV show Dream Home. Using the concept of ‘raumplan’ as the primary design strategy, the design deploys various heights and platforms to re-organise the internal space while largely maintaining the exterior appearance of the building. It deliberately avoided homogeneous visual control and accommodated the residents’ complex functional requirements within a highly restricted space. The research scrutinises various actors’ involvement during the production of the reality TV show and the transformation process. It highlights how the design team navigated the stakeholders’ complex needs and the rigid yet ambiguous policy related to the regeneration of Shanghai’s unofficial urban heritage. By reflecting upon the various formal and informal design practices in this structure and its eventual demolition, the article illustrates the dilemmas in bottom-up regeneration of the historic urban environment in contemporary China.