It was bound to happen. Last month the Pritzker Prize committee named Wang Shu as their 2012 laureate, making him the first Chinese architect to receive the honor. I took a closer look at his work researching another piece, and was impressed with what I saw. Shu is well-known for building with materials salvaged from demolition sites, a practice that gives his structures an extraordinary tectonic presence. He incorporated rubble into the immense, canted walls of this textile museum in Ningbo, so that they seem to emerge naturally out of the earth.
For a long time western architects have understood mainland China as a culture that will simply copy European and North American models of design and construction. And we often look to China (and Russia, South America and India too) less as a place or a culture than as a lucrative, practically limitless new market our own work. A feature in this Sunday’s Times Magazine called “Building the American Dream in China” is typical. It focuses on the professional opportunities in China for American architects, mostly young, inexperienced ones who can’t find work here. After Shu’s Pritzker, hopefully, we’ll be looking more astutely now at what’s being built in China. The new architecture might be one that’s true to place and time, with lessons for everyone.