Wang Shu (Urumqi, China, 60 years old) participated last year in Mugak / Euskadi International Architecture Biennial, held in San Sebastian, showing his famous Ningbo History Museum, whose façade was built with rubble from demolitions.
The only architect from his country to have won the Pritzker Prize, his way of recycling materials and opposing from scratch was traditional in China, but today it is revolutionary.
The interview took place at the headquarters of the Euskadi Institute of Architecture.
Wang Shu traveled to San Sebastian with his wife and partner, the architect Lu Wenyu, and surrounded by a crew that was filming him.
Precise, smiling and kind, although he speaks fluent English, he arrived with an interpreter.
“I'm not afraid to speak.
I'm afraid of not understanding,” he clarified.
He defends updating the tradition.
In China is the ancient origin of Japanese or Korean crafts.
In the 20th century they decided to erase those traditions.
Because?
They wanted to be modern.
They thought that tradition was opposed to progress.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, China went through a phase of fragility.
Other cultures, especially the Japanese, began to put pressure.
And the revolution came.
With the revolution they asked themselves a question: “What has weakened our country?”
His answer was: tradition, the attachment to maintaining a very artisanal culture.
But it was not a weak culture: it had spread throughout Asia.
They felt it anchored the country in the past.
The revolution requires radical change.
Question where you start from.
Everything had to change.
And change.
You do not agree with this idea of destroying the past.
Absolutely.
I think the opposite.
But I am an exception.
At least when I started working as an architect.
In recent years there are more people who question what has happened to culture in China.
I believe that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was destruction.
It destroyed the countryside, architecture, crafts and the educational system.
Also the jobs.
All of that was razed.
A heritage.
A heritage that was perceived as a burden.
The idea was to be modern, to start from scratch.
They opposed concepts to the manual.
What is your idea of progress?
In the tradition itself there has been much progress.
A tradition is updated continuously but slowly.
With time to weigh options and reflect on what is gained and what is lost.
Progress for me is an evolution, not a revolution.
Can we build homes for everyone by hand?
There are two types of architects.
Modern people start from a blank page and build practically the same thing all over the world.
The others, those who work from what exists, be it a place, a material or a tradition, build with memory as well as with ideas.
Wang Shu, next to a model of him at the Mugak Biennial, in San Sebastián.Alex Iturralde
What makes a better architect?
The first step, in any scientific, creative or economic project, must be dialogue.
Something good is rarely achieved by imposing it.
Does your work at your studio Amateur Architecture and at the Xingshan School of Art criticize China's modernization?
I think so.
Through dialogue, try to show that things can be done differently.
And that not admitting other options makes us lose wealth, plurality, heritage and possibilities.
Were they criticized for not doing modern architecture?
We make a more real modernity that dialogues, that works from the place.
Almost all Chinese architects work without paying attention to the context—whether rural or urban.
The way to modernize China was to raze it.
For demolishing everything.
For emptying neighborhoods to start over from scratch.
That, deleting everything, is running out of memory.
Why did you want to do something different?
I was horrified by what was happening.
How to do it by opposing the way of working of an entire country?
With difficulty, stubbornness and little by little.
For years I have felt like a detective, trying to piece together what was there.
How did you resist?
They didn't understand what I wanted to do.
I argued that with large buildings the human scale was being lost.
It is not that skyscrapers cannot be built, it is that humanity cannot be lost.
Architecture cannot neglect people.
It seemed like they just wanted to build more and more.
And bigger and bigger.
The feeling was: when the land on Earth runs out we will build on the Moon or Mars.
That was his idea of progress: not stopping.
Worked with
Ai Weiwei
.
Was she afraid of suffering repression like him?
He is an artist.
He can criticize.
Who is going to forbid him from making more works of art?
There is little they can do to him.
They have had him under house arrest.
Already.
And he can make criticism his own work.
An architect cannot work with an idea like that.
For us the problems are different.
The main one is that it is decided that there is only one professional way to build: fast, industrialized... The political system pressured to build that way.
The goal is efficiency and speed.
Entire cities were built in five years with political pressure: if it was not achieved within that period, they changed the mayor.
I think that interesting things can also be done quickly, but not by destroying everything.
Slow is very expensive.
When you need a lot of time to do a project, you will most likely waste it.
Have you had political problems?
I have a mantra: you can't give up.
I would like to think that with effort and intelligence I can overcome problems.
But have you had political problems?
Politicians, no.
But professionals, many.
I have to assume that that is the policy in my country.
What I propose is not interesting.
For me it is a question of conscience, of avoiding destruction.
That is why we have complicated our lives, the cost has been high.
What we do is an architecture of resistance.
What is a resilience architecture?
The one that tries to ensure that profitability, business, is not what defines buildings.
Architecture is no longer built, it is produced.
Build large constructions without meaning.
Inhuman architecture is that which is not made for people but only to make money.
It destroys jobs, tradition, heritage... and its death has been announced: it has all the pressure to increase production, to reduce times and costs.
Until where?
Don't you see anything good in modernity?
The rest interests me.
But not carelessness.
The modern seems to start from scratch only once.
It invites you to copy more than from scratch.
And I think it's all for speed, for profitability.
How to resist this trend?
I know I don't have enough skill to run that much.
That's why in our studio of 10 people we only do one project a year.
How did you get commissions?
Like so many architects, I did what I advocated when I built my house, which in my case were two interiors of the units where my wife and I lived.
Wang Shu, photographed at the headquarters of the Euskadi Architecture Institute, in San Sebastián.Alex Iturralde
He grew up during the Cultural Revolution.
At that time, at school they gave us military training, which I didn't like at all.
Although to many children, yes.
Because?
I had the feeling that they were telling me what to think.
And since I read a lot, I thought I knew the world better than them.
I knew that the world we inhabited was not the only one possible.
But he didn't say it.
She was silent.
Reading protected me, it opened the door to the world for me.
Why did I read?
My mother, who was a teacher, taught me.
During the Cultural Revolution my mother lost her job as a teacher and was made a librarian.
I went with her to the library every day.
And there, of course, I read.
I have been a very lucky person.
Another fortunate thing was that in high school I saw how the teachers became farmers.
They had to work the land to live.
This is how the institutes became work camps.
But, in reality, a teacher is a teacher, even if during the day he works in the field.
For this reason, when the day was over they would meet at home to talk about literature and philosophy over tea.
I saw and heard all that and learned.
For me, just for me personally, the Cultural Revolution was something joyful, special.
Today life in China is very normalized.
Everyone lives in a similar way.
But, curiously, during the Cultural Revolution those rules were broken.
It was a bit hippy.
Did you feel freer then than now?
As a child, of course.
I also think that he must have been a special child because at night all the kids played outside.
And I... I was always sitting listening to the adults.
That's why people thought I was... weird.
Or special.
He cites writers more than architects.
A studious and quiet child can make a good reader.
Translated into Chinese I read Dickens, a lot of Balzac, Flaubert, Montaigne, Proust, Romain Rolland... And the one that interested me the most was Rousseau.
Did you share what you learned with other students?
In general, no.
I have thought many times about the problem of separating teaching from real life.
That's why when we founded our school we mixed life and work with design.
Why did he talk little when he was little?
Was he afraid?
No fear.
I was rather bored.
When I left China, I thought: I know, the world is not bad.
It's much better than what they told us.
You were raised by your grandmother in Beijing.
Yes, my mother's mother.
My mother had nine siblings.
I only had a younger sister because during the revolution you could only have two children.
I was born in Urumqi.
Because at that time the Government sent the most capable workers to remote areas to develop them.
What did your parents do?
My father played the violin but he was a soldier, like everyone else.
In Urumqi he built the railway, and played the violin for the workers.
I lived in Urumqi until I was eight years old.
Then my father's work with the railroad took us to Xian.
And they took me to my grandmother's house because they thought Xian was a dangerous place.
In Beijing my grandmother lived in a
hutong
, a traditional brick building with a central courtyard.
I was there four years.
And I learned to pay attention to tradition.
Without realizing it, simply becoming aware of how good I felt there, also thinking about what makes you feel good in a building.
Or in a place.
Those kinds of memories enrich your life.
It guides you.
He's back?
Yes. And I thought how small it is!
She remembered it as an airy place, without much private space but cozy.
I think my taste for whiteboard comes from there.
What did your grandparents do?
My grandmother was a housewife.
He was a cabinet maker.
Everyone tells me that he was a great artist.
But I knew him sick in bed.
From him and from his work I learned that craftsmanship is as important or more important than technology.
Because?
Because it roots us.
Curiously, the revolution swept away cultural traditions, but turned many men into carpenters.
There was no industry or money.
It was necessary that someone in the homes themselves be capable of making the furniture.
My father made the chairs and tables in my house.
I helped him.
Turning a board into a table is a great lesson.
In 2006 he was invited to the Venice Biennale and brought 66,000 ceramic tiles.
It was a manifesto.
How could all that be thrown away?
It was my way of showing what shouldn't be lost.
And his way of making himself known in the Western world.
I thought I shouldn't accept the job because we had a lot under construction, the Ningbo History Museum and at the same time the Art School that Lu Wenyu and I founded.
They told me that if I said no, China would leave the Biennale.
They left me with no choice.
They insisted that I was the only Chinese architect who could do something with so little.
And I looked for a solution.
Was it difficult for you to make a living from architecture?
Not a lot, but a little bit.
In China there are many opportunities for architects.
That's why I get angry: there are so many opportunities and we take advantage of them so little!
I never wanted the life of a star architect.
But he is a famous architect.
I am an architect with a different kind of fame.
Foster and all those of great reputation rely on a way of understanding the profession that is not mine.
My philosophy is basic.
And she is critical of the system.
I am not interested in industrial production architecture.
And I'm not just talking about China.
I'm talking about the world.
I am interested in more sustainable architecture not only from an energy point of view.
What is authentic in architecture?
For me beauty is something close, not extraordinary.
Something you can live with and always coexist with.
A house is not a monument.
What is yours like?
We have never had the opportunity to design our house because we are a socialist country and people do not have the right to own property.
In the countryside, farmers may have one that they will never be able to sell.
We live in a flat.
But now I work on the renovation of a town called Wen Cun.
They want to give me an old building, 10 × 10 meters, to live there.
For us it is enough.
Before being an architect he was a builder.
In the nineties I dedicated myself to repairing buildings because I had no orders.
In 1998 I moved to Hangzhou.
The city was beautiful and I thought: why not?
There I considered that an art school capable of doing architecture could be created.
I believed that if artists learned to make architecture their approach would be humanistic.
That defends the school we founded.
What do the architects of your country think?
I think they like what I do.
I think about it because they imitate it.
It's good because there are more people taking care of the tradition.
The bad thing is that they keep copying.
They don't seem willing to stop and think.
Is the waste you defend an ethical defense?
By controlling costs, more than having ideas, I have managed to be the architect I wanted to be.
I am not religious, but I believe in humanism.
I tell my clients that real life is a mix of new and old.
Not understanding tradition is not understanding life.
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