A 186-metre office tower in Shanghai designed by the British architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has won two awards from the Council on Vertical Urbanism China in 2026: Best Building and Best Office Building.

The project, known as One Shanghai and also as the China Resources Building (Shanghai), sits on Shimen First Road in the Jing'an District — one of the city's central business areas. RSHP, the practice co-founded by the late Pritzker laureate Richard Rogers, describes it as a "mixed-use commercial development," though the firm files it under its Office portfolio on its website.

Graham Stirk, a senior partner at RSHP and a longstanding design lead on the practice's commercial towers, is listed among the project team. Stirk has been instrumental in several of the firm's large-scale office commissions over the years, and his involvement places One Shanghai squarely within that lineage of steel-and-glass commercial architecture.

The Council on Vertical Urbanism China, the body behind the awards, recognises projects that advance high-density urban design — the discipline of planning tall, livable, efficient buildings in rapidly growing cities. Winning both the overall Best Building category and the more specific Best Office Building category in the same year is unusual, and the twin honours single out the tower in what is a crowded and competitive field of new construction across the Chinese mainland.

One Shanghai rises to a height of 186 metres, according to RSHP's social media channels. The building forms part of China Resources' broader property portfolio in Shanghai, a city that has seen a surge of premium office construction over the past decade as multinational tenants seek modern, well-connected space in core districts.

For a general reader passing through Jing'an, the tower is one more piece of the neighbourhood's vertical furniture — but the recognition from a vertical-urbanism-focused council gives it a mark of distinction that developers and tenants tend to notice. Awards of this kind can influence leasing interest and rental rates, and they matter to the architecture practices that use them to secure future commissions.

RSHP's project page on the firm's website provides the details of the award and the building's programme. The page does not give a completion date for the tower.

The Council on Vertical Urbanism China has not yet published a full shortlist or jury citation for its 2026 awards, so the rationale for the twin wins remains limited to what the project page reports.

What gives the story its colour is the contrast: a London-headquartered practice, rooted in a tradition of expressive, legible structure — think exposed steel, colour-coded services, the Pompidou Centre's inside-out approach — recognised for a building in a Chinese market that increasingly sets its own design agenda. Whether One Shanghai reflects RSHP's signature structural language or takes a different direction, the firm's own materials do not say in detail. The awards, though, speak for themselves: two categories, one building, one firm with a long track record of getting tall things built.