RAMa 2025 Shanghai Architecture Biennial

RAMa (Rockbund Architecture Museum biennial), also known as RAM assembles, is a biennial festival of architectural thinking launched by the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. The 2025 edition, titled “Shanghai Picnic”, will be held from September 12 to 28, 2025, transforming the ROCKBUND neighborhood into a field of public architectural interventions and urban activations.

Overview

• Event Name: RAMa 2025 — RAM assembles 2025: Shanghai Picnic
• Dates: September 12–28, 2025
• Location: ROCKBUND neighborhood, Shanghai, China
• Organizers: Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), led by its Executive Director and Chief Curator X Zhu-Nowell
• Artistic Director (2025): all (zone) architecture practice (led by Rachaporn Choochuey)
• Format: Entirely open-air, outdoor interventions; free public access
• Theme / Concept: Shanghai Picnic — reactivating underused public space through light infrastructure, social gestures, and ecological awareness

Background & History

The first edition of RAMa (or RAM assembles) was launched in 2023, coinciding with the completion of the ROCKBUND construction project and the opening of a new museum plaza entrance. The project links architecture, public space, and urban life in Shanghai’s historic Bund district.

Each edition invites an external architect or design collective to act as Artistic Director, focusing on a site-specific intervention in the museum’s outdoor plaza, and organizing programs that animate the surrounding ROCKBUND neighborhood.

The 2025 edition continues this trajectory, but with a distinct departure: it places all of its exhibitions in public open space, eliminating indoor pavilions and formal boundaries.

Theme & Curatorial Approach: Shanghai Picnic

“Shanghai Picnic” Concept

The 2025 edition frames the event metaphorically as a picnic — an informal, participatory, emergent mode of public gathering. The curatorial idea emphasizes choice, improvisation, and collective presence: people decide how and where they engage, with light architectural elements supporting rather than dictating.

The guiding principle is “Under a Common Sky, Sheltered to Gather”: the central installation is a minimal shelter, suspended above the plaza, serving as a locus for gathering, rest, shade, and social interaction. It is conceived as reusable, non-prescriptive, and open-ended in function.

This concept aims not just for artistic statement, but to gently advocate for more human-scaled public amenities in urban areas controlled by private landowners. The project becomes a demonstration: small architectural gestures can catalyze more inclusive public life.

Urban Interventions

Beyond the central shelter, there are four selected urban installations, each responding to themes of public function, climate, memory, and everyday life:

• In Search of a Loggia (Tangent Essays) Reimagines an unfinished loggia (a covered corridor) that might have existed historically—bridging alleyway thresholds and suggesting new thresholds in the urban fabric.
• A Gentle Reclaim (Studio Vapore) Introduces soft, mossy forms into a neglected alley, allowing nature to subtly reclaim urban structure—encouraging pause, reflection, and softer edges in the city.
• Pipe Up! (WWWorks) A playful yellow drinking fountain installation that filters rainwater from nearby roofs, returning potable water to passers-by at three accessible heights. It connects to Shanghai’s tradition of civic water infrastructure.
• Food Stalls & Social Infrastructure (Alkhemist Architects) Lightweight food stall structures are introduced, offering small-scale commerce and convivial gathering points, activating pedestrian life.

These interventions together compose a modest but tangible public realm upgrade — not grandiose statements, but small steps in rethinking how everyday architecture can serve the city.

Objectives & Strategy

• Advocate for better public amenities: By placing the architecture in open public space, the biennial makes visible what is lacking (benches, shade, potable water, gathering points), gently lobbying landowners and urban stakeholders to allow more generous public infrastructure.
• Demonstrate lightweight, flexible design: Unlike heavy monuments or permanent structures, the works are intended to be adaptable, reusable, and responsive to site conditions and user presence.
• Reconfigure everyday space: The event reframes mundane streets, alleys, and plazas as potential sites of encounter, reflection, and civic life.
• Engage the public: Because there is no admission fee and all works are outdoors, the barrier to entry is minimal — inviting residents, passers-by, and tourists to engage spontaneously.
• Prompt dialogue and reflection: The installations do not impose a rigid narrative or theory; instead they raise questions about how architecture can gently enhance lived experience.

Site & Neighborhood Context

The ROCKBUND area of Shanghai is a historic district along the Bund, with layers of colonial-era architecture, urban renewal, and shifting land ownership. Over time, much of the pedestrian scale public realm in this area has receded, replaced by privatized plinths and controlled edges.

By situating the exhibition in multiple streets, alleys, and the museum plaza, RAMa 2025 deliberately blurs boundaries between the curated and the existing fabric, pushing architecture into everyday circulation.

Challenges & Reception

Challenges

• Environmental constraints: Outdoor installations are susceptible to weather, humidity, and maintenance demands; some works (e.g. moss installations) struggle under urban environmental stress.
• Temporality vs permanence: While the emphasis on ephemeral, light design is core to the concept, the question remains whether these gestures catalyze lasting change or fade without follow-up.
• Stakeholder buy-in: Persuading private landowners or municipal actors to adopt more generous public design is a long game; an event alone may not shift entrenched policies.
• Balancing ambition with modesty: The curatorial strategy eschews grand narratives; some critics might see it as lacking in scale or vision.

Early Reception

Critics have praised the biennial’s humble ambitions, noting how it sidesteps the tendency toward spectacle in favor of practical gestures in urban life. The drinking fountain piece, in particular, has been singled out as a “charismatic and useful public realm upgrade” with strong relevance to civic infrastructure.

Observers also note how the biennial leverages diplomacy — rather than critique — to potentially influence site stakeholders: by creating small acts of generosity as proof-of-concept, the exhibition aims to seed broader shifts in urban policy.

Legacy & Significance

RAMa 2025 stands out in the global biennial landscape for its grounded, site-specific focus and public-first orientation. Instead of sprawling indoor pavilions or grand thematic statements, this edition asserts that architecture’s power lies as much in small everyday gestures as in monumental forms.

If successful, its legacy may be measured not only by critical reception but by whether the installations inspire enduring improvements to public life in the ROCKBUND area — more shade, seating, water, and invitation to linger. It also marks Shanghai’s evolving position in global architectural discourse: a city that hosts not just spectacles, but experiments in everyday civic design.