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studio.”What is more, according to Wang:
“A hundred years ago in China, the people
who built houses were artisans; there was no
theoretical foundation for architecture.
Today, an official architectural system has
been established, but I chose handicrafts
and the amateur spirit over the system. For
myself, being an artisan or a craftsman is an
amateur or almost the same thing.”
The Amateur Architecture Studio has won
several major awards for its work, including
the Architecture Art Award of China in 2004,
the Holcim Award for Sustainable
Construction in the Asia Pacific in 2005, the
Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in
2007 and the Schelling Architecture Prize
in 2010.
“To look at the state of the [architecture]
profession, it would seem that anything is
possible, and more often than not, we get
anything!” remarked the Australian architect
Glenn Murcutt, a former winner of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize himself and one of the
judges who awarded it to Wang this year.
“Form for its own sake has become a
superficial discipline.Wang Shu and Lu
Wenyu, however, have avoided the
sensational and the novel. In spite of what is
still a short period in practice, they have
delivered a modern, rational, poetic and
mature body of varying scaled public work.
Their work is already a modern cultural asset
to the rich history or Chinese architecture
and culture.”
The Amateur Architecture Studio is best
known for the following buildings in China:
the Library of Wenzheng College (2000) in
Suzhou; the Ningbo Contemporary Art
Museum (2005) in Ningbo; Five Scattered
Houses (2005) in Ningbo; the Xiangshan
Campus of the China Academy of Art
(2004-2007) in Hangzhou; Ceramic House
(2006) in Jinhua;Vertical Courtyard
Apartments (2007) in Hangzhou; the Ningbo
History Museum (2008) in Ningbo; and the
Exhibition Hall of the Imperial Street of
Southern Song Dynasty (2009) in Hangzhou.
Wang Shu frequently uses recycled building
materials, especially old clay bricks and roof
tiles, which unfortunately have become far
too plentiful in China in recent years due to
the indiscriminate demolition of the
country’s old low-rise buildings in order to
make way for new, often foreign-designed,
multi-storey developments. For example,
Wang salvaged over two million roof tiles
from traditional houses that had been
demolished as a result of this profligate
pursuit of progress, and reused them on his
award-winning design for the Xiangshan
Campus of the Chinese Academy of Art.
For the tenth International Architecture
Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2006,
Wang created “Tiled Garden,” an
installation that consisted of 66,000
semicircular grey roof tiles that had been
recovered from demolition sites in China.
This was his subtle yet powerful protest
about the current rapid and often
thoughtless destruction of China’s
traditional everyday built environment.And
the amazing textural walls of perhaps his
best-known building, the Ningbo History
Museum, were constructed from about one
million recycled bricks and tiles salvaged
from old buildings that had been razed in
the region of Ningbo.
Recycled building materials often seem to
have magically absorbed the essence of a
place, which is one of their characteristics
that Wang Shu has taken advantage of to
stunning effect on several occasions.
“Everywhere you can see, [people] don’t
care about the materials,” remarked Wang
Shu while discussing his Ningbo History
Museum.“They just want new buildings,
they just want new things. I think the
material is not just about materials. Inside it
has the people’s experience, memory –
many things inside. So I think it’s for an
architect to do something about it.”
this opening.
Stage one of
the Xiangshan Campus of the
Chinese Academy of Art
(2004) in Hangzhou, designed
by the Amateur Architecture
Studio. (facing page) Ningbo
History Museum.
