As the first and currently the only Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Wang Shu is building houses like poetry.
At the Ningbo Museum, he built a landscape painting-like façade out of old tiles;
At the Fuchun Mountain Pavilion, he echoed the surrounding green mountains with a mountain-shaped roof;
At the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Fine Arts, he left nature in a courtyard-like layout;
……
Wang Shu used his architectural language to reinterpret Chinese culture to people all over the world.
In addition to expressing culture, as an architect and design educator, he pays more attention to the future of China's architectural development.
Wang Shu believes that although the modern reinforced concrete houses in the city provide us with convenience, they isolate the communication between us and make us lose the connection between man and nature.
Therefore, he advocates the reuse of bricks, tiles, earth, wood and other traditional materials, awakening our thinking about "nature" and allowing us to reconstruct our own cultural identity.
At the same time, he also strives to free our eyes from the building itself with his own architectural works, so that when we enter the building, we pay more attention to the atmosphere and surrounding environment of the whole place, and pay more attention to our "life".
In this regard, when he issued his acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize 8 years ago, he raised many sharp questions -
How do architects, who have always regarded craftsmanship as the main body of their profession, survive today?
In the modern city-building movement that spreads urban and rural areas, how should urban buildings develop if they are not demolished and built?
If tradition has been flattened, how can new urban buildings receive memories of history and life in ruins, re-establishing cultural identity?
How can architecture resolve China's growing urban-rural conflict?
In the face of these problems, he has been practicing personally and looking for answers in design and education - "nature" and "life" may be his answers.
Wang Shu Pritzker Architecture Prize China's first recipient is the dean of the School of Architecture of the China Academy of Art
<h1>01 What is the purpose of the design</h1>
Today everyone is talking about design, design is talked about very tall, the connection between design and economy is also talked about very high, but is the spring of design really coming?
I think when we talk about design, we still need to think about some of the most basic questions – what are we designing for and what are we designing for?
This is the Longchang apartment in Shanghai.
Many people will wonder why in modern Shanghai, there is such a place that is incompatible with the word "modern"? Why are you people who are engaged in architecture interested in such a strange place?
Because it tells us what life is.
Longchang Apartment is a record of China's life of great value in an era.
It used to be a detention center for prisoners at the old Shanghai police station, and later residents lived in it again. Because it was not originally a residence, but a public building, it had particularly wide corridors and stairs.
Therefore, when it becomes a residence, there are very vivid cases of life.
The addition of residents has led to a highly interactive scene of life, which is also a scene that we now live in isolated high-rise buildings, which have disappeared for a long time.
Wang Shu was at the event site
So the first question comes – do we design, especially cool design, to wipe out our lives?
Cities across China are now doing an action — demolishing the space where so-called urban villages live together and turning them into "tall" high-rises.
Hangzhou - Guashan New Village
In these demolished spaces, we can also see the past life that holds a little memory, and with the demolition of these buildings, the space left with memories will disappear.
In a sense, when these things disappear, life disappears, and culture disappears.
That's when you start to doubt design — is design meant to wipe out culture?
From an academic point of view, there is actually a paradox in this - the so-called modern design will basically kill its local culture and completely eliminate its traditional culture anywhere in the world.
This paradox is particularly evident in China.
I think there has been a very strong state in China in the past few decades, that is, everyone wants to change - the people have a strong desire to improve their lives and pursue a better new life.
Therefore, we began to have an extreme fundamentalist pursuit of modernization, and the Internet, science and technology, and the emerging AI and so on, all began to have a fundamentalist pursuit.
This kind of fanaticism in the whole society makes me feel very interesting.
In fact, in ancient China, we used natural materials to make many beautiful designs, and the quality and aesthetic value of these works were extremely high.
Today, we have completely abandoned the extremely high aesthetic we have achieved and taken a different path – what we call modern design.
In contrast, you'll find this ridiculous and ridiculous.
<h1>02 Where is the base point of design</h1>
What exactly is missing in our city? How do we get it back? I think it's important that we think – where is the basis for our design?
For me personally and for our studio, this base point is about our thinking about nature.
One of the biggest features of Chinese culture compared to other cultures around the world is the discussion of the topic of nature. This is the root of our culture.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Beijing built modern buildings such as the CCTV headquarters building, which became a symbol of the whole of China.
At the same time, our studio participated in an international sculpture exhibition in Prince Bay Park on the west lake of Hangzhou, and for the first time made a very small work out of rammed earth.
My wife and I were involved in this work and did it ourselves. My wife was pregnant and involved in labor, and she almost miscarried because she was too involved in ramming the wall. But after experiencing it, she said —
"When you really come into contact with this clay as a material and start working, you will find that your understanding of Your own culture in China has changed."
Because Chinese culture is not a culture with theories in the first place, but has slowly developed in practice.
Therefore, under the construction of Chinese culture, materials are always taken as the first consideration. Different materials have different practices, and you have to touch and experience them with your own hands, and your whole consciousness will change.
That's when the so-called design starts to happen.
So, nature is the base point of our design, or the origin of the new work. Later, we built a 200,000-square-meter Xiangshan Campus of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.
We began to think about how to express this reflection on nature in the large public buildings of the city.
The Xiangshan Campus of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts is a complex of buildings, the density of this complex is extremely high, but the buildings are all placed on the boundaries of the campus, and the nature in the middle of the campus is completely left.
This is a choice of man himself, preferring to live a little more crowded and dense, but to leave nature out completely.
So if you go to campus now, you will find that nature is the boss in that place, people are secondary, including architecture is not the most important.
<h1>03 How design continues</h1>
Thinking about nature should not only be expressed in our works, but also introduced into education, parallel to the works.
Through the education of architectural design, we must change the awareness and values of the next generation of the whole design.
Therefore, the students of the School of Architecture of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, from the first year to the fifth grade, will have hands-on courses like rammed earth, which is the characteristic of our college.
In the past two years, we have also been working with MIT and Southeastern University to conduct joint education for graduate students. We took the students to the countryside of Quzhou, Zhejiang Province, where we designed the lives of the villagers in the village.
Conduct research
They would live in farmers' homes with computers and conduct their own small internal discussions and competitions over a period of three weeks, while also working with the village craftsmen to discuss the structure and conduct design exploration.
Try it out and discuss it with the villager craftsmen
Construction, the villagers enthusiastically participated
Eventually, the students designed the basic structure, which was then built by the local villagers.
In the past four years, we have built a total of four houses in the countryside, and some villages have even become Internet celebrity villages after our houses have been built.
This is the first pavilion with toilets at the entrance of the village that we built. At the center of it is the pool, where local women wash their dishes, wash their clothes, and engage in social activities.
It is a vegetable market + toilet design. It was originally the second-place option that was lost in the internal competition. However, after the selection, the village strongly demanded that the second-place plan should also be created.
In the end, it was also built, a vegetable market during the day, and people in the village would come here at night to watch movies and use the space for many similar activities.
It is with this kind of architecture that we are responding to nature and life.
And I think it's more important that the younger generation, through this kind of activity, begins to rethink the roots of our lives, the roots of design.
These works do not seem to be tall or high-tech, but in fact, I think it is of great significance for the future development of society, life and culture.
This speech is compiled from Wang Shu's keynote speech at the 10th Anniversary Forum of Shanghai City of Design "Construction of Design City".
Organizers: Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Shanghai Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Construction Administration Commission, Shanghai Municipal Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, Shanghai Municipal Leading Group Office for the Promotion of Cultural and Creative Industries, Tongji University
Co-organizers: Jing'an District People's Government, Huangpu District People's Government, Hongkou District People's Government, Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League, East China Construction Group Co., Ltd., Donghua University, Shanghai University
Organizers: UNESCO Creative Cities (Shanghai) Promotion Office, Shanghai Design City Promotion Center, China Industrial Design Research Institute, Shanghai Institute of Corporate Culture and Branding, And Technology Creation
Partner: Hillhouse Capital Group
(Reprinting of this article without authorisation is prohibited.) ）
Edit | Chai Chaochen
Video | Heavenly Boy