After being shut for more than four months, the 45-year-old Shanghai Exhibition Center in downtown is getting a much-needed facelift.

The renovation work began last week, and will take about seven months before it reopens in February to host next year's People's Congress of Shanghai.

"The general guideline is to restore the original Russian architecture to the complex," said Shen Lidong, president of the Shanghai Landscape and Architectural Decoration Design and Research Institute, the chief designer for the project.

Main effort will be put into strengthening the complex, including furnishing it with quake-proof facilities, Shen said.

The scale of the renovation will be the biggest since the center was built in 1955, with the municipal government pumping in nearly 240 million yuan (US$29 million), officials said.

All 42 exhibition halls and 100 office rooms in the exhibition center, along with some cinemas and banquet halls and coffee houses - covering an area of some 60,000 square meters - will undergo renovation.

The center has been a regular venue for government conventions and large-scale expos, but age began to take its toll, leaving it in a precarious condition, with fissures in the walls and the central building sinking nearly 2 meters, Shen said.

The project will ignore an audacious proposal of raising the structure by 8 meters, which was advocated last year by Jiang Huancheng - a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the chief designer of the Oriental Pearl Broadcasting and Television Tower.

"The idea put forth by Jiang has never been put into practice on such large buildings; and it will be too expensive," Li Jianyao, a project director, explained.

It was estimate the levitation would take about two years to complete, and cost nearly 1 billion yuan, Li added.

Simply put, Jiang's idea was to jack up the three buildings, weighing a total 10,000 tons, to the same height as the nearby Yan'an Elevated Road, construct a new 8-meter base underneath and then put the structures back on.

That, the 63-year-old Jiang hoped, will give the 110-meter tower more visibility, add more exhibition space and shore up its crumbling foundation.

(Eastday.com.cn 07/06/2001)