As China emerges as the world’s most popular playground for post-modernist architects from the US, France, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere, transforming their wild dreams into beautiful pieces of reality, and redefining China’s urban landscape in the process, a native Chinese architect has made the world sit up and take note.
This year’s Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest global honour that carries the same prestige as the Nobel, has gone to Wang Shu, whose design of the Ningbo History Museum in Zhejiang Province breaks a new path that may not be all that wild but is no less innovative. One might say, it forms a simpler, but bolder, approach to modernism and, in the words of the Pritzker citation, shows “the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideas”.
Wang’s Pritzker comes 29 years after another Chinese, the legendary I M Pei, won the same award in 1983, being acclaimed for giving the world “some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms”. Though Pei, often called the master of modern architecture and a poet of pure geometry, is a Chinese American with pronounced cubist inclinations, he shares with Wang a deep respect for tradition and the environment in which a building sits. The two bring to world architecture a philosophical approach that’s essentially eastern and combines functionality and aesthetics in a uniquely transcendent manner.
“An individual building, the style in which it is going to be designed and built, is not that important,” Pei once said. “The important thing, really, is the community. How does it affect life?” And he writes in the introduction to the first Chinese edition of his Complete Works, a showcase of his sculptured forms released last January during the Beijing Book Fair: “The beauty of Chinese poems, paintings, and gardens has always been the fountainhead of my inspiration.”
One of Pei’s latest projects, the Suzhou Museum, reflects this beautifully. Suzhou is where his ancestors come from and it’s to Suzhou, naturally, he wanted to give his best. The city’s many canals and gardens, and the whitewashed plaster walls and wooden frames of its low houses have had a lasting influence on his idea of environment and community in architecture. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Pei has designed the 10,700 square metre museum to look like a garden built around a pond and a rock-garden setting, making a unique blend of local traditions and contemporary styles.
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In his major works, which are all in China, Wang’s goal has been the same: to present a contemporary approach that acknowledges the rich tradition of Chinese architecture, producing results that, in the words of the Pritzker jury, are deeply rooted in their context and yet are universal, “exemplary in their strong sense of cultural continuity and reinvigorated tradition”.
The Ningbo History Museum is the epitome of all that Wang, 49, stands for, where he mixes modern design with traditional material with stunning effect. The façade is like an armadillo shell of 20 different types of grey and red recycled bricks scavenged from the area, pierced with small, erratic, rectangular windows that look like a Mondrian painting. It has an old, excavated look, but with pure geometric shapes that lend it drama and make it come alive.
Wang’s philosophy is also reflected in several college campuses he has designed, especially the library complex for Suzhou University’s Wenzhang College. Since Suzhou’s mountain-and-water setting demands that no building should be prominent, nearly half the complex is underground and its rectangular main body floats on water.
One might say Wang’s Pritzker is a reconfirmation of the Asian spirit in world architecture. Five other Asians, all Japanese, have received the top honour in Pritzker’s 33-year history for works that assert the role of community and environment, where a building is not an intruder. They include the redoubtable Kenzo Tange (1987), who led the reconstruction of Hiroshima after World War II; Fumihiko Maki (1993), whose buildings are like layers of transparent planes and spaces; Tadao Ando (1995), who defines spaces in ways that allow a constant change of light and wind patterns; and Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, joint winners of the 2010 Pritzker, whose works, in the words of the jury, “explore like few others the phenomenal properties of continuous space, lightness, transparency, and materiality to create a subtle synthesis”.
At an interaction at Harvard University soon after he won the Pritzker, Wang said the best way to experience his work was to look at it as a “scrolling landscape.” Reassuringly, that’s how the world looks at architecture today, too, more as a flowing philosophical idea unfolding in sudden twists and turns, than simply as static space entombed in glass and steel. That should raise the hope China needn’t, after all, loose all its diversity and tradition while chasing a vigorous modernist future.