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The DR Bar (DR for ‘Design/Research’) in the Xintiandi section of old Shanghai was the third stop that Prof. Eugene Wang said I must make in his favorite city in the world. It’s the trendy martini bar a stone’s throw from the historic first meeting-place of the Chinese Communist Party. All around it, Xintiandi is a growing market of global boutiques and a sign of China’s capitalist makeover marching on.
Benjamin Wood, a very New England sort of American, designed both the bar and the district around it. He was a protégé of the late Ben Thompson, the man who famously rescued the Faneuil Hall marketplace in Boston. Thompson designed and built many buildings around town, including the five-story, concrete-and-glass Design/Research space on Brattle Street in Harvard Square, where locals encountered Marimekko fabrics and midcentury-modern furniture in the windows beginning in 1969.
Ben Wood sees Xintiandi as a kind of tribute to his mentor, who didn’t live to see it. He repurposed two blocks of the city’s old shikumen courtyard houses, slated for destruction, into an airy, luxury shopping district that sees 82,000 visitors a day.
Now he serves as a consultant to many of the major and minor cities around China about their own dreams of a new urbanism. Wood is at war with the soulless, high-rise reality of those cities, as he told me over his famous martinis at the DR Bar. He favors “Monkey Gin” from Germany, which he says is the critical ingredient of the best martinis made today. I’ve come to believe him.
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