Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu founded Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou in 1997, and together they have spent nearly three decades building a body of work that treats memory, material, and craftsmanship as inseparable from architecture itself. Wang, who in 2012 became the first Chinese architect to receive the Pritzker Prize, has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Tongji University, and now serves as founding dean of the School of Architecture at the China Academy of Art, a program he and Lu established together in 2003. Their buildings, among them the Ningbo Historic Museum, the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, the Fuyang Cultural Complex, the Lin’an Museum, and the Hangzhou National Archives of Publications and Culture, are built from salvaged tile, reclaimed timber, and the accumulated labor of local artisans, work that the New York Times named among the twenty five most significant works of postwar architecture. 

Lu Wenyu directs the Experimental Center at the China Academy of Art’s School of Architecture and has held visiting appointments at Harvard and MIT alongside her partner. She chaired the RIBA International Prize jury in 2024 and has contributed her expertise to UNESCO’s Asia Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, work that extends her architectural practice into the wider stewardship of historic building traditions across Asia. This spring, La Biennale di Venezia named Wang and Lu curators of the twentieth International Architecture Exhibition, opening in May 2027, the first time architects from China have led the Biennale’s architecture exhibition. Their curatorial theme, Do Architecture, calls the discipline back toward building itself, toward reuse, slow transformation, and the physical act of making rather than theory alone.

The photograph of Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu was taken by Hailun Ma for PIN-UP.