Three on the Bund (Union Building)

Three on the Bund (外滩三号, Wàitān Sān Hào) is the former Union Building at No. 3 Zhongshan East 1st Road: the first steel-framed building in Shanghai, the first work in the city by the firm Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), and since 2004 a complex of restaurants and private dining rooms. It was completed in 1916 for the Union Insurance Society of Canton, a marine insurer.

Palmer & Turner had opened a Shanghai office in 1912, sending George Leopold Wilson to run it. The Union Building was Wilson’s first commission in the city, and the firm went on to design the HSBC Building, the Custom House, Sassoon House and the Bank of China on the same waterfront. Chinese accounts say the steel frame was ordered from Krupp in Germany. The building is six storeys high; English Wikipedia gives a site of 2,241 square metres and a floor area of 13,760 square metres.

The design is Renaissance revival with Baroque details: a symmetrical granite-faced facade, Ionic columns beside the entrance, a Baroque shield over the main door, and a domed turret on the corner of the Bund and Guangdong Road (广东路, Guǎngdōng Lù). The frontage on the Bund is narrow, so the main entrance is on Guangdong Road, and the building carries a second address, 17 Guangdong Road.

The Chinese name 有利大楼 (Yǒulì Dàlóu) comes from a tenant rather than the owner. The Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, known in Chinese as 有利银行, moved in in 1922. In 1937, after the fighting in Shanghai that summer, the insurance society’s accounts were frozen and the bank bought the building outright. It was closed during the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945.

After 1949 the bank wound up its Shanghai business, and in 1952 it handed the building to the municipal government. From 1953 it housed the Shanghai Civil Architecture Design Institute, followed by other design and geological offices. The city listed it as an Outstanding Historical Building in 1994, under the name 有利银行, and in 1996 it was included in the Bund Buildings group protected at the national level.

In 1997 the Singapore-based Giti Group acquired the building and commissioned the American architect Michael Graves to rebuild the interior. The facade was restored and the structure reinforced, and Three on the Bund opened in September 2004 with a Jean-Georges restaurant, the Shanghai Gallery of Art, an Evian spa, an Armani store and The Cupola, a private dining room inside the roof dome. Until that renovation the address had been No. 4 the Bund; the signage adopted No. 3.

The operator’s website now lists POP, Mercato, Canton Table and Jean-Georges among its restaurants, with Club Whisper, The Cupola and banquet floors above. For a visitor the building is open in the way a restaurant is open: the dining floors admit customers, and the entrance on Guangdong Road is the place to look at the columns and the corner dome.