Ningbo Museum

The site was a district of villages until it was cleared for a new administrative centre, leaving the museum standing more than a hundred metres from anything else. Wang Shu's response was to make an object with its own horizon: a solid base of three floors that splits, higher up, into five leaning masses read as a fragment of mountain, with a stepped valley cut into the south side after the manner of Northern Song landscape painting. The surface is the argument. Bricks, roof tiles and stones salvaged from the demolished villages were handed to the masons, who laid them up in wapan, the regional technique used to rebuild after typhoons; where walls lean away from vertical the cladding is instead concrete cast against bamboo, which leaves the cane grain in the surface. Windows are scattered without alignment. Construction began on 31 August 2006 and the museum opened on 5 December 2008.