Shanghai Grand Theatre

This guide to the Shanghai Grand Theatre follows French architect Jean-Marie Charpentier, who won an open 1994 competition against fourteen rival firms with a design built like a piece of cosmology: a square base for the earth, a curved roof for the sky. It traces why his team turned to the Jiangnan Shipyard, which had spent a century bending steel into ship hulls, to fabricate and raise the seven-thousand-ton roof. You'll hear how the glass curtain wall beneath it broke new ground for a cultural building in China. Watch how the roof looks different by day than it does once the glass begins to glow at night.