Lu Wenyu met Wang Shu as an architecture student at what is now Southeast University in Nanjing, and co-founded Amateur Architecture Studio with him in Hangzhou in 1997, when both were still building almost nothing and Wang Shu was completing a doctorate. She has directed the studio's construction and material research since, working with masons on-site to test how salvaged brick, tile and stone can be relaid into new walls, and now teaches alongside her partner at the China Academy of Art. When the Pritzker Prize went to Wang Shu alone in 2012 despite their joint authorship of every building credited to the practice, including the Ningbo Museum, the omission drew public criticism that Wang Shu himself has echoed; in 2010 the two shared the German Schelling Architecture Prize.
