The spacious days of Shanghai are definitely at an end, and we have reached a period which has taxed the ingenuity of the architect to the utmost to produce a residential building able to show a profit. Flats were not uncommon 15 or 20 yea ago, but those then in existence would not now in the majority of cases be greatly esteemed. Generally in those former days people desired a house with spacious verandahs, giving on to x piece of ground preferably large enough for a tennis court, and the verandah ought certainly to have been able to accommodate several deck chairs for the comfort of people in the summer months.
The position, for all except the fortunate ones with sufficient capital to build a house to meet their special requirements, ry different to-day, and it can readily raced to the high price of land which makes every building site in Shanghai of extreme value. Not only do we refer to the figures above quoted, but the opinion of one well versed in ings should be added, this to the effect that there is not a single lot of land in Shanghai to-day which is not wanted by somebody for his special purpose.
So much for that aspect of the case—the question of price and so forth—there are several more which call for consideration, When building materials were cheap people planned a house which would be as cool in summer as possible; and so rooms a considerable head spae and had wide verandahs. The very sharp winter, however, docs not seam to ye been given the ame consideration, before the days of central heating it was no easy matter to keep such houses warm in the cold weather, To-day the architect designs his house on very much more compact lines, and it is only when his client is prepared spend a very considerable sum of money on his residence that the same large and high rooms are given, Furthermore nowadays when such are wanted, central heating becomes a sine qua non. For the rest, it is a case of getting the greatest amount of living room out of the smallest possible amount of building space lable, and the fact that this is being done to-day brings us to another aspect of the situation, The better buildings which we see being erected nowadays, more: suitable for ull the kinds of climatic conditions that we get, are in the final aspect the result of Shanghai having attracted to itself a better class of architect than was the case a generation ago. No doubt the science of architecture hes advanced in these intervening years, but there is also this, that the men who now undertake the princeps work here have very much higher qual fications than their predecessors,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.