В Шанхае школу весом 7600 тонн перенесли на механических ногах, чтобы освободить место под новый комплекс

When an old building gets in the way of new development, its usual fate involves a wrecking ball so there’s something odd about what happened in Shanghai’s Huangpu district in the autumn of 2020. Instead of knocking a 7,600-ton school down, engineers made it walk out of the way. The building was the Lagena Primary School, a five-story, T-shaped structure that the municipal board of the former French Concession built in 1935. A new office and commercial complex was going up on the site. Rather than demolish the school, the developer moved it. Not on wheels, not on rails, but on legs. How do you move a building without knocking it down? The short answer: you separate the building from its own foundations and then carry it. Crews from the firm Shanghai Evolution Shift dug around and beneath the structure, cut through the supporting pillars, and lifted the whole thing onto a set of mechanical supports. Those supports took the load in place of the old foundation. Shanghai chose this over demolition for reasons that are partly practical and partly about the city’s own history. The city has a long record of relocating buildings, and an equally long record of losing them to demolition during decades of fast modernization. The Lagena school sat in the middle: old enough to be worth keeping, inconvenient enough to be in the way. Moving it was the compromise. As Lan Wuji, the project’s chief technical supervisor, put the trade-off, “Relocation is not the first choice, but better than demolition.” What the supports actually do This is the part that makes the project unusual. Beneath the building, the team installed 198 mobile hydraulic supports that act like robotic legs. Lan described it in more human terms. “It’s like giving the building crutches so it can stand up and then walk,” he said. The method was new: Shanghai Evolution Shift developed this walking-machine approach in 2018, and this was the first time it had been used to move a historic building in the city. The big advantage of the walking legs over older methods is that they can turn. Earlier relocations in Shanghai used rails. When the Shanghai Concert Hall, built in 1930, was moved 66 meters in 2003 to clear space for an elevated highway, it traveled along a track in a straight line. A rail can carry a building forward. It can’t walk one around a curve. Why 18 days, 62 meters, and a 21-degree turn The school is T-shaped, and its new plot sat at an angle to the old one, tucked in beside the incoming office complex. Getting it there meant not just covering distance but rotating the whole building so it fit. Over 18 days the legs walked it 62 meters and rotated it 21 degrees along a curved path, finishing on 15 October 2020. That works out to a crawl, roughly three to three and a half meters a day. The pace was deliberate. A T-shaped building on a curved route is exactly what a flatbed or a straight rail can’t handle, and rushing a heavy structure through a turn is how you crack it. Lan makes a large claim about this. “During my 23 years of working in this area, I haven’t seen any other company that can move structures in a curve,” he says. That’s his own account of his firm’s edge rather than an independently checked fact, but the curved route does explain why the walking method was chosen here over rails. Why bother saving it at all Moving a building isn’t a purely sentimental act. There’s a cost argument too, though a fuzzy one. Lan wouldn’t put a number on the Lagena project and said costs differ case by case, offering only that “in general, it’s cheaper than demolishing and then rebuilding something in a new location.” That’s a generalization, not a costed comparison for this school, and we’d read it that way. As for what the saved building becomes, the developer has plans rather than a finished result. The project’s general manager, Li Jianfeng, said the team “will transform the school into a building integrating cultural education and intangible heritage preservation, involving both culture and innovation.” What we find most interesting is what the method makes possible once it exists. If a building can walk, then standing in the way of new construction stops being an automatic death sentence for the old thing. The approach has since grown. In 2025 a larger Shanghai project, the Huayanli Shikumen complex, was moved using 432 walking robots to shift 8,270 tons, more legs and more weight than the school. The Lagena move reads less like a one-off stunt now and more like an early test of a plainer idea: that some old buildings are movable furniture, not fixtures, and the choice between keeping them and clearing them is more open than it used to be.