Wang Shu: Choose life, choose ideals

This article is jointly presented by Southern People Weekly × Sands Wine, telling the story of architect Wang Shu's new choice for a better life. What Wang Shu pursues is a simple, simple, and honest life and art that constantly questions his origins and roots.

Although it was 50 years ago, Wang Shu's memories are vivid and abundant; it is precisely because his later life is very different from his youth that his memories will continue to be awakened.

Wang Shu was born in 1963 and grew up in Xinjiang. In the 1960s, classes were suspended and revolutionized, and students and teachers became peasants. "The school's more than seventy acres of land have all been reclaimed into farmland, and we all have to participate in labor, especially excited to plant corn, harvest corn, plant peppers, harvest peppers, plant watermelons, harvest watermelons... In the evening, everyone sat together drinking good Pu'er tea and inferior coffee, talking about Lu Xun and Pushkin. It was like a special utopian era. It was a very rich life, and a lot of things were learned in that era. Wang Shu recalled. When he was 7 years old, he carried water for his family, shook his body on the well in winter, took off his gloves, and the iron reel stuck to the skin on his hands. "It hurts when the skin falls, but I still do it every day. I love carrying water, and I can experience the joy of carrying water. ”

Memory creation

Wang Shu knew that these memories were not precise, mixed with awakened imaginations. "I was just a child, and in the eyes of a child, I saw what I should have seen." The campus, made up of daytime farming and nocturnal literature, is an idealistic and creative school; labor itself shines with a certain brilliance, and the houses that can be worked are a kind of rebirth of the living world.

30 years later, Wang Shu designed the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art and also worked on the renovation plan of Fuyang Wencun. The former is the same as the xiangshan mountain extension direction, leaving a large open space, retaining the original farmland, river and taro fish pond; the latter contains 24 kinds of farmhouse design, put into the patio and agricultural tool storage, drying grain, silkworm breeding space.

As an architect, every construction plan of Wang Shu starts from personal memory. "Of course, I need to look for and organize in memory. This kind of work depends on my understanding of the house, my understanding of the world in which the house is located, and my likes and dislikes of architecture. He said.

The Xiangshan campus is an ideal of a better life and a memory of utopia. Architecture is the landscape, and architecture is designed as a mountain, inheriting the tradition of Chinese sending love to landscapes. The entire campus was demolished into more than thirty buildings, like a village, so that people have the space to walk freely in it. Each building is limited to a height of about 12 meters, "the final height of the big trees must be able to exceed the building... My architecture is about blending in with nature. "More than a decade later, the Xiangshan campus has lush vegetation, lush vegetation, vines crawling all over the outer walls, woods and meadows crisscrossing into trails, and the scenery on campus changing with the four seasons, which will always give visitors some paradoxical illusions.

The Pritzker Prize's award speech to Wang Shu mentions that Wang Shu's works can evolve into buildings rooted in their historical background, never outdated, and even world-like. The sense of "time" is the most important part of Wang Shu's design. Western architecture has been in decline since its completion. But the traditional Chinese architecture that Wang Shu likes, because of the change of architectural materials and natural scenery, is older and better.

"Professors from home and abroad often visit the Xiangshan campus, and several professors tell me how they feel about this campus, saying that this campus is too strange, and every time they feel that they have walked all over the corners of the campus, but the next time, they can always find a new place, which has never been seen before." Wang Shu said.

The life of "people"

What the outside world is talking about is that for seven years, the talented young architect Wang Shu did not take over the "decent" job and relied on his wife Lu Wenyu, who is also an architect, to support his family. He lived in seclusion in the West Lake, walking the streets and alleys, drinking tea and writing, studying landscapes and gardens, eating with the contractor, and watching the retired uncle play mahjong and snort melon seeds.

Seven years later, Wang Shu received a project to design the library of Wenzheng College of Soochow University, with a construction area of 8,000 square meters. Wang Shu designed the "Square Box" library by the pond, with a pavilion at the water's edge overlooking the green mountains. This project allows Wang Shu to really show his sharp edge and attract the attention of all parties.

"Those seven years seemed to be idle, but I found a lot of real sense of life, and in this state I gradually saw the most transcendent content of Chinese culture: nature." This is not wild nature, it is Chinese Taoist nature, and this exchange with nature for thousands of years has formed a state of relaxation that is neither artificial nor natural, but natural. People continue to learn from nature and return their lives to a state very close to nature, which has always been China's humanistic ideal. ”

Wang Shu has been to many countries, and he is most interested in not the large buildings in various places, but the daily life of residents. Every time he went to Paris, he would sit for a while in the café on the left bank, go to the market and eat a meal at the stalls. "I like to observe what kind of life people in the city are like. Just looking at how people on the road walk around is very interesting. Metropolises will have good street systems, and you'll sit in a roadside café watching pedestrians, and there will be a lot of onlookers watching you, and it's like the relationship between the audience and the actors. ”

The other day before the interview, Wang Shu went to Hangzhou's Southern Song Dynasty Royal Street for a stroll. It was the main road of the city that he designed, a commercial pedestrian street that contained the history of Hangzhou: the old and the new were mixed and interesting, and people were inventing the use of various buildings in front of the door, under the window, and on the street corner at any time. When walking through Hefang Street, Wang Shu stood in front of a high-door wall medicine shop and looked inward from the small door opening: "It's like a secular opera, all kinds of people are doing different things in it, different corners are talking about different things, all the extras, they act so vividly." I stood in the doorway for a long time, like watching a movie, completely intoxicated, it was so good-looking. ”

In Chinese gardens, cities, architecture, nature, poetry, and painting form an integrated state that is indivisible, difficult to classify, and densely mixed. Wang Shu does not like the word "design", he likes "construction": a kind of physical and mental planning and construction activities, not only refers to building houses, cities or gardens, but also refers to the construction of water conservancy ditches, the firing of ceramics, the weaving of bamboo fences, the manufacture of furniture, the construction of bridges, and even the creation of small objects to chat about leisure. Creation is inseparable from life, and even synonymous with life.

"Construction" is Wang Shu's way of life. After graduation, he was going to Guangzhou, which has more commercial prospects, but passing through Hangzhou, he got off the train for a few days and was attracted by the city's natural and bland atmosphere. "In Hangzhou, everyone talked about culture and art, and talked about some very ideal things. It's also very pleasant. ”

When we asked Wang Shu what his ideal life should be, he replied that it was a life of freedom and relaxation and thinking. "I'm actually a book reader and I want any of my research to because I'm interested and don't need anyone to order me to do anything. It's like walking in a garden and thinking about the issues I care about, and that's my ideal life. ”

That fortuitous trip to Hangzhou made Wang Shu determined to settle in Hangzhou. "It's very cozy here, no one is forcing you to be comfortable in some kind of social way, you can choose for yourself."

answer

In 2000, Wang Shu was invited to teach at the China Academy of Art and established the Department of Architecture. Xu Jiang, then president of the Academy of Fine Arts, said that he invited Wang Shu in the hope that the Academy of Fine Arts could have a different architecture department and rebuild contemporary Chinese local architecture.

Wang Shu produced a professional volume for the first batch of students on the creation of spaces by philosophers, Zen masters, farmers and architects. All four are mythists, and the myths are connected to the hands to awaken their original senses of reality and to repair the senses that have deteriorated. This examination paper is consistent with the question that Wang Shu had to answer at the beginning of the establishment of the department: what is the academic thinking of the department, and what kind of people it wants to cultivate.

Twenty-one years later, when we asked Wang Shu for the answer to this question, he replied with certainty: "We want to get a more artistic, more living, more Chinese academic and architectural." We all think it's not interesting to just teach architecture. It is not interesting for students to only do architecture for a lifetime after graduation. Compared with architecture, we all think that the house refers to things that are smaller and more rustic, as long as you can make small houses, you will build big houses sooner or later. ”

First of all, students have to learn drawing for four consecutive years, and then choose calligraphy or landscape painting, which is beyond the general engineering college of artistic training. Second, students go to the city and the countryside to investigate and understand the real daily life. "I'm talking about everyday life, not popular life, but everyday life with taste. What should the real state of the city and countryside look like? What's better? I want students to come to life. ”

He spoke of the full suburbanization of the city. "Neighbors in high-rise buildings don't deal with each other; if you want to go to a mall, you have to drive from one underground garage to another; go to a huge mall and buy enough for a week. This is typical american suburban life. But after decades of development, we have turned cities into huge suburbs. And people's interactions with public nature, real state of life exit. After being processed by various plans, life was cleaned up, leaving behind a glamorous simplified, commoditized life. ”

Small vegetable markets, small individual shops, the interaction between these people will bring a little chaos, can not be carefully planned, but these with a certain spontaneous meaning of life, may make people closer to their own nature.

"More interaction with people, more hands-on work, will make life better." Wang Shu said. So he asked his students to work. "We have a lot of carpentry classes, masonry classes, rammed earth classes, metalworking classes," he said. Many children who have experienced the college entrance examination will be very depressed. ”

During his research in the countryside, Wang Shu saw people in the hall house working as carpenters or raising silkworms. "The traditional Chinese space setting, life and production are mixed together, which is what moves me the most. The latest thing I know about architecture now, the most beautiful thing must be that there is some kind of space where labor can happen. ”

A few days before the interview, the teacher in the department told Wang Shu that the carpentry class for the first-year students had begun. The children carried the wood to the workshop, as if they were going to play, and their faces were particularly happy. Children have never found learning so fun and so natural.

"That's what we want. Schools must not only make these children rethink what life is like Chinese, but also make them happy. Wang Shu said.