"If I weren't an architect, I'd have been a writer." That was the answer to the last question I asked at the press conference, which incidentally was the last question of the conference. Even in a room full of reporters, we could all see something of Wang Shu from the start. There wasn’t an uneasiness with being in the spotlight, it was more like a disregard for it. Remaining eternally respectful and pleasant, there was simply a tedious and weary air to the man as he was bombarded with questions about architecture. And then it happened, my colleague asked about books. His demeanor shifted and we all listened as the man dressed more like a member of the traditional Chinese literati than a modern architect lifted his head along with the corners of his mouth to tell us about his favorite poems, his love of calligraphy (Jiu Cheng Gong Li Quan Ming to be exact), and how the one kind of book that he refuses to read is a book on architecture.
This is a man steeped in his discipline, so much so that it doesn’t seem like talking about architecture is really necessary. Talking about a poem, talking about other forms of language and how we converse in them, talking about how a building is a kind of language, that seemed to be infinitely more interesting to the man that is heralded for incorporating environment into his work. But there is already a flaw with the semantics of that last sentence. Wang Shu doesn’t believe that the building is any more important than the environment, or vice versa, he regularly reiterated that they were, and always are, in dialogue. 14
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Much like a poem, he talked about his buildings as such, with rhythm and timing being as important as the words themselves or the way they are arranged on a page. The reasons why he has now become the first Chinese person to receive the incredibly prestigious Pritzker Prize are myriad and beyond my understanding of architecture. But, I can’t imagine that Wang Shu would think that was important anyway. There is something incredibly egalitarian about the man.
entire campus is designed by Wang Shu. Many of them are stunning and dramatic in an austere way, but he took us to a room filled with drawings with a jagged hole cut out of the wall. Through the opening we came to his version of a traditional Chinese courtyard with sweeping roofs that resembled epic waves of water and long vertical lines that seemed to go to the vanishing point. He answered a few more questions, seemed content that he had done his duty in regards to allowing us to follow him around for the afternoon and abruptly left.
When the questions in the conference ended, we were asked to follow him on a tour of the architecture school in Hangzhou. Every building in the www.n i ngb ogui d e.com