Wang Shu

Wang Shu is a Chinese architect whose contemporary buildings draw on traditional materials and construction. He received the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

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Ningbo History Museum: A museum in Ningbo, China, designed by Wang Shu and completed in 2008, using reclaimed bricks and tiles from demolished buildings. Its varied masonry makes material reuse and local building memory central to the design.
Reclaimed building materials: Building components recovered from existing structures for reuse in new construction. Wang Shu uses salvaged bricks and tiles to preserve traces of earlier buildings within new work.
Amateur Architecture Studio: The architectural practice founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu in Hangzhou in 1997. The studio's name and practice express a deliberate distance from routine professional conventions.
Pritzker Architecture Prize: An international annual award recognizing a living architect for significant contributions to architecture. Its 2012 award to Wang Shu brought global attention to his work and to Chinese architecture.
International Style: A modern architectural style marked by geometric forms, functional planning, and minimal ornament. Its universal visual language contrasts with Wang Shu's emphasis on local materials and construction histories.
Xiangshan Campus: A campus for the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, designed by Wang Shu and built in two phases. Its courtyards, varied roofs, and reused materials turn a large institutional commission into a landscape of distinct buildings.
瓦片: Traditional Chinese roof tiles are overlapping fired-clay elements that shed rain and form patterned roof surfaces. Their reuse links his buildings to familiar regional construction and craft.
Lu Wenyu: A Chinese architect and co-founder of Amateur Architecture Studio with Wang Shu. Her collaboration is central to the practice behind many works associated with Wang Shu.
Architectural preservation: The protection and continued use of buildings and places valued for their history or cultural significance. His reuse of demolition debris challenges the separation between preservation and new construction.
Tabula rasa: An approach to planning that clears an existing site to make way for new development. His use of salvaged building fragments opposes the erasure implicit in treating sites as blank slates.