SHANGHAI.- Launched in 2023, RAMa is the Rockbund Art Museum’s (RAM) biennial festival of architectural thinking. Conceived and led by X Zhu-Nowell, the museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, the initiative explores architecture’s evolving role in shaping public space. For each edition, an architect or architectural thinker is appointed as Artistic Director, tasked with developing a site-specific intervention in the ROCKBUND neighborhood, a historic district in the heart of Shanghai, focusing on the open-air Museum Plaza outside RAM’s main entrance. In addition, the Artistic Director curates a series of public programs and events that activate the broader ROCKBUND. For the second edition, Zhu-Nowell has invited all(zone), a Bangkok-based architecture practice, as Artistic Director.
all(zone)’s concept of “Shanghai Picnic” proposes a flexible, open-ended framework that reactivates underused urban spaces through conviviality, creativity, and ecological awareness. Using lightweight, reusable canopies and adaptive programming, Shanghai Picnic invites citizens and visitors alike to experience the city in ways that are improvisational, playful, and often unexpected — beyond what architects or designers might anticipate.
At its core, a picnic is about choice: people decide where to sit, what tools and utensils to use, what food to bring or buy, and how they engage — whether up close as active participants shaping the event, or from a distance as observers. This informal, improvisational element transforms the city into a shared canvas, a kind of picnic blanket, where spontaneous interactions, collective imagination, and activities become integral to the space itself.
The interplay between the designed and the improvised engenders new ways of inhabiting the urban fabric, suggesting a more fluid, responsive approach to public space — one that values adaptation over permanence. A picnic cultivates a sense of agency, enabling people to reclaim their surroundings, make the space their own, and realize the festival’s vision through their presence, actions, and choices — fleeting yet meaningful. At the Museum Plaza, this vision takes shape. All(zone) designed Under a Common Sky, a temporary light structure that serves as both shelter and gathering place for the program’s duration.
Rapid urbanization and gentrification often disconnect individuals from their living environments, creating an estrangement that is particularly evident in many Asian cities. Vibrant neighborhoods that have evolved organically, shaped by collective activities, are increasingly replaced by sterile urban developments, which do not take into consideration the pre-existing culture of the neighborhood and its human physical and social interactions. As these conditions come to dominate urban living, how can we empower city residents with autonomy over their space and agency within it? How can architecture enhance contemporary connections between people and their living environments? How can we infuse notions of community, diversity, ecology, and vitality into sterile spaces with spontaneity, yet without chaos? Both RAM assembles and all(zone) seek to address these questions.
Rachaporn Choochuey, co-founder of all(zone) architects, comments: ‘What if architecture could return this vitality? What if public space could once again feel like a playground for living—spontaneous yet harmonious, energetic but never chaotic? Could design bring back the fun of being together—and, just as importantly, give people agency over the spaces they inhabit?
We see ROCKBUND during RAM assembles as a site of experimentation, a place to test these ideas in real time. It’s where we come together to explore, create, and redefine what living in urban space can be. It will not be a set of answers, but a public laboratory. Its legacy will be measured not in permanent structures, but in the questions it raises and the observations it generates—observations on how we might truly live, work, and play together in the cities.’
