His New Hangzhou Project Has Opened. We Asked Architect Wang Shu About His Clients and This Era

Wang Shu says this era leaves him feeling a little helpless — the helplessness of “a mantis trying to stop a chariot.”

In 2012, at the age of 49, Wang Shu became the first architect from mainland China to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. More than four years on, “nothing has changed,” Wang says — except that clients now come in an endless stream, and he usually takes on only about 2% of what he is offered.

So when Wang surfaced again after the prize, with a new work, it became an event.

In Fuyang, on the southwestern edge of Hangzhou, the “Fuyang Three Museums” — the city’s art museum, museum and archives — are still about six months from completion, but people were already too impatient to wait. At the opening ceremony on September 23, 2016, the crowd was so dense that the organizers had to cap attendance at the afternoon keynote. Several young architects who had traveled in from other provinces argued with the security guards after they were turned away and could not get inside to meet Wang, the buildings’ designer.

It is probably no exaggeration to call Wang Shu “one of the most admired architects working in China today.” When the media describe him, they still quote, over and over, a line from his Pritzker citation of more than four years ago: he can “evoke the past without directly using historical elements.”

His use of recycled roof tile and brick produced a strange, lovely effect in an earlier work, the Ningbo Museum, and showed how far he will experiment with materials and building methods. This self-described “very local” architect is also invited abroad from time to time to exhibit, or to teach as a visiting professor at schools including MIT.

In the past, local governments in China hesitated over Wang’s designs; they preferred foreign architects for their city landmarks — Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Headquarters, nicknamed the “Big Underpants,” or Tadao Ando’s Aurora Museum in Shanghai’s Lujiazui. Now they, too, have come to trust this architect so admired by the international architecture world.

Xu Jiang is president of the China Academy of Art and a friend of Wang’s. He was the first to recognize what was distinctive in Wang’s architecture, and he had the standing to see the designs built — and it was his admiration for Wang that spread to government departments in Hangzhou and the region around it. Most of Wang’s current projects sit in Hangzhou and Ningbo.

This time the Fuyang district government produced a 69-mu site (about 11 acres), with a hill on one side and a hill at its back, and asked Wang to design the Three Museums. It is the largest project he has ever done. Officially released figures put the cost at about 500 million yuan, a sum unimaginable in any of Wang’s earlier work. In the past, what went with his famously long construction schedules were his famously small budgets.

Wang has spent years trying to prevent one thing: that his buildings, marked by local character and traditional culture, end up looking like “hollow symbols of nationalism.”

Now he has to be even more careful about it. The Fuyang Three Museums stand at the elevated entrance to the city, across from the bus stop that serves as Fuyang’s “tourist pier.”

The Intellectual

Not everyone likes Wang Shu’s architecture.

Xu Jiang invited Wang to rebuild the China Academy of Art’s architecture department and handed him the design of the Xiangshan Campus. But when the first phase was finished, some people still thought the buildings — full of tilting, crooked columns — were extremely ugly, and a few wished they could be torn down.

Even after Wang won the Pritzker and people began trying to understand these experimental buildings, some architects still shrugged and said that Wang’s way of doing things “could never work in commercial real estate.”

Wang calls himself a “man of letters,” an “intellectual.” That shows first in his relationship with commercial real estate, which is sharply drawn. “An intellectual has to speak up to society. That includes how we choose projects — that thinking is there from the start. We turn down most of what we are offered and do very few projects,” Wang says.

On one occasion he even delivered this verdict on Tadao Ando’s Aurora Museum: “I don’t see what is good about putting makeup on reactionary developers, and I don’t see what is good about building a little museum in front of a pile of apartment blocks and putting on a show.”

Wang tried a real estate project exactly once, around 2000 — the residential development Vertical Courtyard Apartments, or “Qianjiang Era.” It was his only commercial job, and he saw at once that he could not accept commercial developers: driven by profit, and prone to waver. They usually show some appetite for risk early on, but in the end they always ask Wang to compromise along with them.

His resistance to capital makes Wang look like a cynic. Half out of spite, he named his practice Amateur Architecture Studio — partly, too, because he holds no architect’s license. The studio, which originally had six people, has picked up a few more in the past few years, with students from the China Academy of Art helping out in the name of study. The rate at which it takes work has also gone up, from one project a year to two.

Still, Wang said in an interview in September that the studio never enters design competitions — the main way architects win work under the modern system — and instead “just drinks tea by West Lake,” waiting for people to come.

The Ideal Client

The relatively ideal clients Wang has waited for turn out, usually, to be governments.

At the opening of the Fuyang Three Museums, Wang placed himself beside the local Fuyang government, on the opposite side from property developers. If this land had gone to real estate, he said, it would have fetched more than 1 billion yuan. So he “admires Fuyang’s leadership” for being willing to “take this piece of land, with a hill on one side and a hill at its back,” and give it to a public building.

Clearly, Wang cannot entirely escape the politics that public buildings carry. Put bluntly, these “behemoths” are always used to record major events and to build a local or national image everyone can rally behind; and at the same time, who else would pour in time and money without counting the cost, and find it almost impossible to walk off the job halfway?

The answer could not be more obvious. As Norman Foster, founder of Foster + Partners, has recognized, this is a relationship of mutual dependence — but the dominant party is “never the architect.”

Wang believes he is just as tough when he deals with government.

“You can foresee that this kind of [nationalist] intention is there, so from the start you design in a way that keeps it from being realized. And I have another rule, which I always state upfront: if things waver partway through and they stop following my original design intent, I can leave at any time. I don’t care about any one project — I can simply not do it. I’m an amateur architect. I can go home whenever I like,” Wang says.

An example Wang likes to give these days is his other Fuyang project, the renovation of village houses in Wencun, an outlying township southwest of Fuyang. He has stressed on more than one occasion that he won this project by negotiating with the Fuyang government. He recounts what he told them: “Unless you let me rebuild Wencun, I won’t take the Fuyang Three Museums.”

Wang calls the Wencun renovation a social experiment in “rural urbanization.” His interests plainly run past architecture. He redesigned 24 houses in Wencun’s new village — plain, hard-edged buildings stripped of the “American pastoral” look that rural villas usually carry, but keeping the courtyard Wang considers essential to Chinese life. Now, though, he has found that some villagers have glassed their courtyards in, turning them back into rooms, while decorating companies from the city “want to go all out” inside.

Wang can stop none of it. He compared this social experiment with his public building work:

“For the Three Museums I have one client. For Wencun I have a hundred clients. It is enormously troublesome. You need something of a social-service, social-work frame of mind to even attempt it. With the mindset of an architect designing an art museum, there is no way to face it.”

“It Depends How You Use Them”

Most of the time, Wang manages to talk his government clients around. Before construction began on the Ningbo Art Museum, the planning department held that a public building must have a large plaza in front of it, but Wang still got the official in charge of urban construction to nod at his “great courtyard” instead. After the Ningbo Museum scheme was settled in 2004, the client kept objecting to the wall of recycled tile and brick. Before long, though, Wang had “infected the client, the supervising body and the construction company alike with the passion of making something new.”

By the time of the Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, “it was Ningbo’s leadership demanding that we use the recycled tile and brick and the bamboo-formed concrete that had worked on the museum.”

These stories are recorded in Wang’s recent book, Building a House (《造房子》), a collection of essays written over the past decade and more.

On the evening of the opening ceremony, Wang’s wife Lu Wenyu heard that the Fuyang Art Museum would be renamed the Hangzhou Art Museum. A government official made the decision after attending the ceremony, which meant the museum could carry its influence over a much wider area.

Lu Wenyu, who is in some sense Wang’s spokeswoman and agent, laughed and said: “See, sometimes the government really does do good things — it just depends how you use them!”

When she heard the news, a local employee of the Fuyang art museum bowed to Lu Wenyu again and again, saying Fuyang was in luck and that she had done Fuyang a great service. The implication was that Fuyang would become famous because of these buildings, and that fame might pull along more of the local economy. All of which, in the end, comes back to the capital Wang keeps at arm’s length.

Q = QDaily

W = Wang Shu

Q: Most of what you design is public buildings. How do you handle the relationship with government agencies as your client?

W: My attitude in dealing with government is generally very tough. The point of being tough is to get the thing done well. A lot of their original intentions are quite good, but you have to understand, architecture isn’t that simple. Hiring me is sometimes asking for trouble — I come with trouble. Whether you accept my design is one thing; the construction is so troublesome that most people can’t bear it. So do you really want me to do this? Do you really want me to do it? That’s the question I always ask. Are you really prepared to support me without reservation for at least four years? You can’t waver partway through, because all kinds of things will come up that make you waver. That’s how I ask, every time.

Q: What do the government officials you’ve dealt with care about? Has that changed over the years?

W: I basically use this method, and it screens people out very effectively. Once I’ve pressed them like that, they’re usually quite resolute.

Q: Then why are most of your public buildings now in the south rather than the north?

W: Not entirely. In the north, it’s mainly… because our methods are unusual — the way we use materials, the way we use craftsmen, means a huge amount of work on site. Take the north, projects that are especially far away: for one thing, we don’t know those places deeply enough. For another, it really is inconvenient in the middle of the work. So I’m truly… I think about problems at the scale of the whole world, but I work in a small place. I’m a very local architect who occasionally works elsewhere.

Q: After the Ningbo Museum drawings were done you had arguments with the client. How has the Fuyang project gone?

W: This project, at this stage, has gone especially smoothly. They had almost no objections at all to the scheme I put forward. At that point it becomes our professional part — how we realize it technically.

Q: Is that rare?

W: Not that rare, actually. Generally my projects go fairly smoothly, because I screen both the project and the client carefully. Once I say yes, it’s a commitment. I don’t like making commitments.

Q: You’ve stressed that “the basic architectural ideas and prototypes come from local roots, not from hollow symbols of nationalism.” But that tension must still come up often, since people care about different things. Does it worry you?

W: You can foresee that this kind of intention is there, so from the start you design in a way that keeps it from being realized. And I have another rule, which I always state upfront: if things waver partway through and they stop following my original design intent, I can leave at any time. I don’t care about any one project — I can simply not do it. I’m an amateur architect. I can go home whenever I like. I’m not like a professional architect who has to keep working no matter what.

The best thing about being an amateur architect, I think, is that I can walk away at any moment. Worst case, I go drink tea by West Lake.

Q: Is the studio still six people?

W: I think we’ve added two. The studio still isn’t big. Projects are more or less continuous now, because any one of them takes so long that over a year we always end up taking something new. Besides being a small studio — there are about eight of us formally, and the rest are students, because they’re here to learn from me.

Q: You need a steady stream of projects?

W: Of course. Being an architect is hard work. Once you’re in it, it’s about the same as a farmer working his land. Much of the middle is tedious; a project runs four or five years, and you have to grind through it. Sometimes even I can’t hold on, can’t grind it out. It’s exhausting, genuinely exhausting. For a project like this one, a very large project — if you had a big team where everyone trusted one another, fine. In reality a few of us do an enormous amount of work. And that leaves you truly worn out.

Q: How many projects are usually running at the same time now?

W: More than before. We used to do one a year; now we do two a year, and by the third year that has overlapped into six, and by the fourth year eight. So don’t underestimate two a year, because our way of working is different. Take the drawings for the Three Museums: we started drawing in the first year and kept drawing until the beginning of this month, when the final drawings finally went out. What design institute would you find that spends four years on the drawings for one project?

Normally the drawings for a year-long project are simply finished — nobody works the way we do. To move fast, ordinary Chinese architects never take a design to the depth it needs; the drawings they hand over are never really finished, everyone accepts that they’re unfinished, and that’s what gets built. We just make an extraordinary effort to accomplish things that shouldn’t be possible in China.

Q: What does the “amateur” in Amateur Architecture Studio mean?

W: Because I want doing architecture to be a pleasure. I don’t want to be an architect whose only aim is a practical, real-world end. Only a genuine amateur, in the true hobbyist sense, really loves it. … I have always faced reality with a very passive attitude, and a firm one.

Q: Did you go to the construction site yourself on this project?

W: Of course. A lot of problems have to be solved very precisely on site. I’ve trained my assistants well, but there are still plenty of things they don’t dare handle, because they often find that after they’ve dealt with it, it’s wrong. So basically, either they tell me how they plan to handle it and I can judge from a distance and give my opinion without going there — or I can’t judge it myself, and then I have to be on site.

Q: With the Tengtou Archives, you said you were relieved you no longer had to go to the site.

W: It depends on the method. The craftsmen on the Tengtou Pavilion at the World Expo, for instance, were all people who had become highly skilled on the Ningbo Museum. This time was different. The way I put it, this time the wall surfaces follow cunfa, the texture strokes of Chinese landscape painting, running with the shape of the hill, and that kind of variation is something craftsmen simply cannot execute. Even my assistants still often can’t get hold of this kind of variation. For the roof surfaces alone I went out several times, explaining it over and over; two days later I’d find the craftsmen still didn’t understand, so I’d go back, explain again, go back again. I had them look at the clouds in the sky, look again and again, until one day it was more or less there — not entirely up to the standard, but they had done their utmost. Sometimes not understanding the standard is only natural, because the standard itself is a little vague. All I can say is that I understand it better than other people.

Q: When it appears, you know it’s there?

W: Yes, yes, exactly.

Q: How do you think about materials? In the Wencun renovation, for instance, you used materials particular to Wencun.

W: Of course. This time the art museum and Wencun are a pair of projects, so I especially stressed the… (the echo between them?) Yes. What I wanted was for a farmer to come and look and say, hey, that’s exactly how we build our house. Except theirs is museum-grade. That’s roughly the idea.

Q: Is stressing local materials necessary in general, or only for this project?

W: For something to really reach people, you have to help build a connection to everyone’s feelings. Of course you can’t just say “local” in a simple way. The material is local, yes, but you won’t find it used this way on any house anywhere; the method of use goes beyond what an ordinary house would do. So it is local, and it isn’t.

Q: You worked with Ai Weiwei on a project called the Cola House. At the time you said you hoped students could live in it once it was built, but they didn’t, and you felt some regret.

W: You can’t force it. I have always hoped students would dare to experience it for themselves. Don’t let it become… A problem our architects fall into very easily now is that architecture is made for other people, not for your own life. That’s what “professionalism” means, too. All these things keep you at a remove. And then a great danger appears: you don’t understand other people’s lives at all, you are cut off from their world, so what gives you the right to operate on their lives like that? That is very dangerous. This is why I say I’m an amateur. Part of being an amateur is that I’m conscious of the dangers of the profession. I know this profession is dangerous. Architects bear a great deal of responsibility for the destruction of the city. Architects bear a great deal of responsibility for the destruction of tradition. You can’t wash your hands of it that cleanly. I can say with some pride that none of it is on me, because I never took part in any of it from the beginning. From start to finish I have been very clear about doing what I ought to be doing.

Q: Is this something you’ve always guarded against?

W: Since I graduated I have never done any of the things ordinary architects do.

Q: Did you already see this, back then, as the greatest crisis in contemporary architecture?

W: Yes. As a graduate student I wrote an essay. Very few people have read it, but a lot of people know of it. It’s called The Crisis of Contemporary Chinese Architecture (《中国当代建筑的危机》), and I said it clearly enough there. What I said then is no different from what I say today; I have simply made good on all of it. I have always thought that what you say, you have to do.

Q: Is there anything about being an architect that leaves you feeling particularly helpless?

W: I feel it’s this era that leaves me a little helpless. It isn’t being an architect. You can see it in this era: what I’m doing runs somewhat against the tide. It feels a bit now like a mantis trying to stop a chariot — Quixotic work.