Wang Shu was born in Ürümqi, studied at what is now Southeast University in Nanjing, and completed his first building — a youth centre near Hangzhou — in 1990. He then took almost no commissions for eight years, working alongside craftsmen on site and studying for a doctorate at Tongji, completed in 2000. In 1997 he and Lu Wenyu founded Amateur Architecture Studio, the name a deliberate rebuke to the professionalised practice they blamed for the erasure of old Chinese neighbourhoods. Their buildings are made largely from what demolition leaves behind: salvaged brick and roof tile laid up in the regional wapan technique, concrete cast against bamboo, walls whose surface records a village that no longer exists. He is dean of architecture at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and won the Pritzker Prize in 2012.
