From the Pritzker Prize to the Venice Biennale: 5 projects to understand Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu

Last November, the Venice Architecture Biennale announced that Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu—founders of Amateur Architecture Studio—will curate the 20th International Architecture Exhibition in 2027. The choice appears less aligned with the Biennale that has just concluded, directed by Carlo Ratti and focused on intelligence as shared and interconnected knowledge, and more consistent with the renewed international interest in Chinese architecture, further reinforced by the recent awarding of the 2025 Pritzker Prize to Liu Jiakun. With Liu Jiakun, Wang Shu shares not only the prestigious recognition (Wang received it in 2012), but also membership in a generation of designers who, from the late 1980s onward, found themselves working in a context that had largely erased its built heritage. This was a generation therefore compelled to confront the need to define a new path toward modernity—one that was both viable and sustainable. From this emerged the urgency to imagine alternative development models, far removed from both the spectacular icon and serial reproduction.

It was within this context that, in the late 1990s, Amateur Architecture Studio was founded by spouses Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, who have pursued a coherent trajectory equally committed to innovation and to Chinese tradition. Their work has unfolded almost as a form of architectural resistance, grounded in the reuse of materials, the employment of artisanal techniques, and sustained attention to landscape and local culture.

This is evident in their best-known works, moving backward from the Lin’an History Museum (2022), one of the studio’s most recent projects, to the Ningbo Museum (2008), a building that presents itself as an artificial geological mass constructed from materials salvaged from local demolitions, in which the city’s history becomes literally part of the structure. The same principle guides the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art (2007) in Hangzhou, a vast university complex built using millions of reclaimed bricks and roof tiles.

Outdoor spaces, too, are often reinterpretations of Chinese tradition: the famous Jiangnan gardens—idealized micro-landscapes typical of regions south of the Yangtze River—are reimagined in the campus spaces, as well as in projects such as the Ceramic House (2005) in Jinhua. Even the pictorial tradition enters the work of Amateur Architecture Studio, as in the Fuyang Cultural Complex, inspired by a celebrated painting created in the mid-14th century. Today, this approach to design returns to the center of debate with the Venetian appointment of Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, who have always paired their design practice with intense theoretical and academic activity—most notably in 2007, when they established a School of Architecture, with Wang Shu serving as its first dean. While we await the first previews of the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale—its themes and participants that will shape the curatorial framework—it is worth exploring the cultural operation carried out by Lu Wenyu and Wang Shu through five of their most significant projects.

Located in the Yinzhou district, the Ningbo Museum is often regarded as the key work of Amateur Architecture Studio, as it synthesizes the design philosophy of Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu. Completed in 2008, the building stands on a plain once occupied by rice paddies and historic villages demolished following intensive urbanization. The museum itself gives voice back to tradition by integrating local topographic elements into its design: its jagged silhouette echoes the surrounding mountain ranges, while the façades are built with over 20,000 bricks and roof tiles salvaged from demolished villages, combined with concrete poured into bamboo formwork. Through the use of reclaimed materials and vernacular construction techniques, the project becomes both a radical critique of urban homogenization and a manifesto for architecture’s ethical responsibility.

Developed between 2001 and 2007, the Xiangshan Campus for the China Academy of Art represents one of Amateur Architecture Studio’s most complex works, where architecture intertwines with the natural landscape of Hangzhou’s hills. Once again, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu employ recycled materials—more than seven million bricks and tiles salvaged from demolitions—to create buildings that integrate with their context and reflect local traditions. The project reinterprets the tradition of Chinese courtyard-based schools, adapting it to the hilly terrain through a series of articulated, permeable buildings. The result is an architecture that elevates craftsmanship to an institutional scale, proposing an alternative and sustainable vision of construction in the early 2000s.

Designed in 2001 and completed in 2007, the Vertical Courtyard Apartments in Hangzhou represent an experimental attempt to reinterpret large-scale collective housing through an architectural language that seeks humanity at height. Rather than anonymous towers or attention-seeking forms, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu designed a group of six buildings in which each dwelling has access to a shared courtyard. The aim, in the designers’ own words, was to “overcome the isolation typical of high-rise residential buildings while preserving the living experience of the traditional two-story courtyard,” effectively translating the idea of the Chinese courtyard into a vertical dimension.
This choice is not merely formal: it challenges the homogenization of urban housing models and seeks to restore a sense of community and human scale even at high densities.

Located near the course of the Fuchun River in Zhejiang Province, the Fuyang Cultural Complex is an ambitious work that merges museum, galleries, and archives into a single spatial narrative. Responding to the site’s steep topography, the project unfolds as a series of terraced volumes connected by paths, courtyards, and ramps that invite visitors into a sequential experience akin to a journey through a painted landscape. Indeed, the project draws direct inspiration from the famous 14th-century painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by Huang Gongwang, exploring how the principles of Chinese landscape painting can be translated into architecture. More than a single building, the complex takes shape as a constructed, walkable, and layered landscape, where interior and exterior spaces flow seamlessly into one another. Once again, the combined use of local materials and contemporary techniques underpins Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s reflection on the relationship between architecture and landscape, subtly renewing the imagery of Chinese landscape gardens.

The Ceramic House in Jinhua is a small yet poetic example of how Amateur Architecture conceives architecture as a material and sensory experience. Completed in 2005 within the Jinhua Architecture Park, this 120-square-meter structure—conceived as a café or pavilion—features interior, exterior, and floor surfaces entirely clad in ceramic tiles, offering a contemporary reinterpretation of the region’s long-standing porcelain-making tradition. The project focuses on the relationship between wind, water, and rain characteristic of Jinhua’s climate, translating these conditions into a form that appears shaped by the elements themselves. The use of sloping surfaces and irregular volumes creates a fluid and ever-changing interior experience, where light and shadow become integral parts of the spatial narrative.