HUMLEBÆK.- With the exhibition The Architect’s Studio. Wang Shu – Amateur Architecture Studio, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art introduces a new series of monographic architecture exhibitions offering the opportunity to get a closer look at the work process of an individual studio and gain a better understanding of how ideas become form. Over the coming years, a new generation of architects will be invited to shape an image, in collaboration with Louisiana, of their own practice. In accordance with the world around us, today’s pace-setting architecture is concerned with sustainability and social challenges such as climate change and overpopulation, urbanization and cultural heritage. The exhibition series intends to shed light on how intention, expression and method come together for each individual architect.

The exhibition series starts in China, more specifically Hangzhou, capital of the eastern Zhejiang province, where Wang Shu (b. 1963) and his wife Lu Wenyu established the Amateur Architecture Studio almost twenty years ago. Since 2007 he has also functioned as Dean of the Hangzhou department of the China Academy of Art, Xiangshan Campus. In 2012 Wang Shu was honoured with the world’s most prestigious architectural award, the Pritzker Prize, and since then he and Lu Wenyu have enjoyed growing international acclaim of their uncompromising persistence in combining the China of past and present in their architecture. Based on a manifesto for so-called amateur architecture, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu work with architecture rooted in the anonymous rural architecture and the available materials such as bamboo, local brick and rammed-earth walls. At the same time classic Chinese virtues like calligraphy, garden architecture and landscape painting play a crucial role in the philosophy of Amateur Architecture Studio.

Despite its culture-sustaining potential, Wang Shu’s architecture is at the same time characterized by transformation, development, the breaking-down of boundaries and disruptions of scale. The formal idiom can have an almost futuristic character, while the building materials may be hundreds of years old, and the construction techniques a hypermodern transformation of building traditions inherited and perfected over millennia.

Themes of the exhibition
The exhibition, shown in the Hall Gallery and the Column Gallery on the lowest floor of the Louisiana museum, has been created in close collaboration with Amateur Architecture Studio and is built up around three main themes aiming to shape a comprehensive presentation of the ambitions, processes and inspirations of the studio. The exhibition includes models, video, photographs, material specimens, texts and filmed interviews with Wang Shu explaining and illustrating the studio’s processes and many complex building processes.

The first theme, AMATEUR ARCHITECTURE, functions as a kind of introduction to and collage of the sources of inspiration and fundamental principles characteristic of Amateur Architecture Studio’s work. Wang Shu’s ‘own’ school, the immense Xiangshan Campus, plays a central role here, as an architectural work, but also as an example of the studio’s very literal effort to preserve and perpetuate China’s long, proud cultural traditions.

The second theme of the exhibition, ARCHITECTURE AS RESISTANCE, presents a collection of material studies, almost all of which related to two of the studio’s most recent projects. As a condition for taking on the task of building a large cultural centre, museum and archive in Fuyang, Wang Shu insisted on being granted permission to initiate a restoration project in the remote mountain village of Wencun. The village is an example of the widespread tendency of depopulating the rural areas as a consequence of China’s explosive urbanization, and Amateur Architecture Studio’s Fuyang/Wencun project illustrates their efforts to balance the relationship between the rural and the urban, while also maintaining local village culture and building traditions. The project thus becomes an architectural comment to the Chinese authorities’ relentless cycle of demolition and new construction. The material studies are accompanied by video and audio from the huge construction project in Fuyang and the calm rural life of Wencun.

Finally, the third theme, HISTORY RECONSTRUCTED, with the signature project Ningbo History Museum as a case, shows how the studio brings increasingly forgotten history back into modern architecture. The museum is of course primarily a spatial framing of the thousand-year-old history of the Ningbo area, but also an example of the material consciousness that has now become synonymous with Amateur Architecture Studio. Several villages in the area were demolished to make way for new building, but the materials from the destroyed villages have been gathered and re-used in the spectacular facade of the Ningbo History Museum. In this way, the architecture becomes a very tangible memory of the original houses and a monument to Amateur Architecture Studio’s idea of making the new building point back to history.