Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion

Of the roughly eighty cases assembled in the 2010 Shanghai Expo's Urban Best Practices Area, only one represented a village rather than a city: Tengtou, in Ningbo's Fenghua district, whose model of eco-agriculture and rural tourism the Expo organisers wanted showcased. Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, commissioned in 2009, built the pavilion on a narrow site using the same salvaged-material technique they had just tested at Ningbo Museum — brick and roof tile recovered from demolished village houses, laid up by hand in overlapping courses. Visitors moved through a sequence of self-similar spaces devoted to the sounds, sights and produce of Tengtou, arranged to feel deeper than the shallow site allowed. Unlike several Expo pavilions preserved afterward as a permanent cultural district, the Tengtou pavilion was demolished in March 2015 when the site was redeveloped, leaving Ningbo Museum as this partnership's only surviving public building of its kind.