On June 24 2009, The Skyscraper Museum in New York City opened China Prophecy: Shanghai, a multi-media exhibition that examines Shanghai's evolving identity as a skyscraper metropolis. Featuring models of the major iconic structures, including Jin Mao, Tomorrow Square, Shanghai World Financial Center, and the new super-tall Shanghai Tower, as well as computer animations, film, drawings, and historic and contemporary photography of the city, the exhibition combines an in-depth look at the new generation of towers with an overview of the sweeping transformation of the city’s traditional low-rise landscape into a city of towers.

The exhibition documents this stupendous urban transformation through film and photographs of old and new Shanghai, including this 20-minute video odyssey traveling the city’s streets and highways filmed by resident cinematographer Jakob Montrasio.

Read more about the exhibition here:
jakob.montrasio.net/2009/07/11/pictures-from-the-opening-of-the-china-prophecy-shanghai-exhibition-in-the-new-york-skyscraper-museum/

Music: Yoshida Brothers

skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/CHINA_PROPHECY/urban_odyssey.php

German-born Jakob Montrasio currently lives in Shanghai, working as a photographer and cinematographer. The Skyscraper Museum discovered his photographs of Shanghai skyscrapers on Flickr and contacted Montrasio, who then volunteered to reshoot the towers with high-resolution equipment. All of the eleven-foot photo murals in the exhibition are his work.

Also for the Museum, in 2009, he created this 20-minute video odyssey of Shanghai's streets and highways. The film was shot from a bus deck and the sidecar of a Changjiang Motor Bike. The extraordinary floating quality of the film was achieved with an arm extension and stabilizer through a car's sunroof as he documented the street life and changing architecture of Shanghai's vibrant and diverse neighborhoods.

"As a cinematographer, I am confronted daily with the problems inherent in the capture of moving images, filled with sound and people. Timing and lighting are both important. Shanghai is a hectic city, full of life and movement. The city's chaos can end up quite frustrating and even boring at times, so I find it relaxing to photograph architecture. Buildings don't show up late or require make-up and artificial lighting. Photographing buildings, one of the oldest forms of art, is particularly satisfying when I find an angle and a style of coloring that pays the architecture the respect it deserves.

At that point, I usually subject my photos to an intense editing process, enhancing the visual aspects almost to the point of overkill and creating a new and unique work in the process. I find the raw photos can be greatly developed in this manner and usually spend hours editing my best shots on the computer. Shooting the skyscrapers of Shanghai for The Skyscraper Museum was a technical challenge. Dozens of close-up shots were stitched together to create the eleven-foot tall images. Examining them at this scale has elevated my admiration for architecture, as it is difficult to create something of that size that still looks beautiful."

-Jakob Montrasio

Video: Jakob Montrasio, "Shanghai" (2009)