Union Brewery

Address: YiChang Road

Text with kind permission from www.hudec.cn

Union Brewery Ltd, formerly Shanghai Beer Factory, was located at No.130 Yichang Road, which recently, a renewal project, converted the old factory building into a complex with galleries and shops, and Mengqing Garden shops along the Suzhou creek.
The Union Brauerei AG (established in 1911) was run by the German company Schwarzkopf & Co. The brewery produced 2,000 tons yearly (2 million liters) and had 100 employees. The brewery was purchased in 1919 by a Norwegian businessman. Frithjof Gustav Cark Hohnke, who can be credited for making beer popular in Shanghai. Victor Sasson bought most of the shares of the brewery in 1935 and the name was changed to Shanghai Brewery. Hohnke continued as director of the company, and kept his private villa, built by Hudec, in the French Concession, now the chancery of the Belgian Consulate.

The English Jardine Group built a new factory on this site. Designed in October 1931 and completed in May 1933, the factory once boasted being the biggest beer producer in the far-east containing 11,100 square-meters of plot area and 28,800 square-meters of building area.
The main business of the factory was as a Brewery. The process was controlled by mechanization and all the equipment was imported from overseas. To make full use of the land area, the master plan was designed in a horseshoe shape. The main structures included a brewery building, bottling building, garage, office building and electric- power room etc. The bottling building was five-storeys high of reinforced-concrete construction. The south facade which was shaped in a curve had extensive horizontal windows. The north façade, shaped in hackle, had filleted corners. The new factory had more commodious inner-space, on a no-beam floor system which was rarely used. The brewery building was nine-storeys high in a reinforced-concrete structure. A tower on the east façade was built in Art-Deco with similar disposal, for the entrance along Suzhou creek. These two buildings both had dark architraves around the windows and air corridors between them. As a part of the renewal project along Suzhou creek, the factory site, of which none of the original buildings exist, has been changed into an ecological green park named Mengqing Garden in 2005, and also has a brewery.
As one of the two huge industrial factories designed by Hudec, Union Brewery Ltd. successfully integrates Modernism with industrial design. (The Factory site was listed among the Heritage Architectures of Modern History in Shanghai since 1999).

Union Brewery

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