Architect Wang Shu’s answer to the wholesale destruction of historic Chinese cities is to collect the stones of demolished buildings and install them in new ones.
The Hyatt Foundation of Chicago announced today that Wang has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize. He will receive $100,000 and a bronze medallion this May in Beijing.
A history museum by Wang Shu in Ningbo, China, a port city, includes local recycled materials.
With his wife, architect Lu Wenyu, Wang runs a small firm called Amateur Architecture Studio, staffed mostly by students in Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai. He also heads the architecture department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
Wang wasn’t an obvious choice for the prestigious 34-year- old Pritzker because he isn’t the well-established celebrity architect such big awards often celebrate. (Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel have been winners in the past dozen years.)
An exterior view of one of the buildings in the Xianshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, China. It's rising and falling window patterns and stairways are an almost whimsical contrast to the industrialized rows of identical buildings typical of rapidly urbanizing China.
“Over the coming decades, China’s success at urbanization will be important to China and to the world,” said Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation in a statement. The late billionaire Jay Pritzker founded Hyatt Hotels Corp. (H)
As it hurtles into an urban future of megacities, China has obliterated centuries of urban and cultural history.
An interior view of one of the buildings in the Xianshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, China.
Ceramic House (2003-2006) in Jinhua, China.
