AT THE PARALLEL SCENE. A CONSTRUCTION EXPERIMENT OF A MUSEUM AND A SALVATION OF AN AREA OF VILLAGES

In 2012, Fuyang City commissioned Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu to design the Fuyang Museum. They did not immediately accept, but put forward a condition: priority had to be given to preserving the remaining villages, and only then would they design the museum. Given that in the past twenty years the traditional villages of China have been almost fully dismantled and replaced by mediocre replicas of suburban commercial villas, Amateur Architecture Studio has always been interested in learning from traditional buildings and country culture. These elements, now abandoned and completely forgotten, were built with good quality and delicate crafts, and were perfectly integrated with nature.
They say that applying such hand construction language in the modern large-scale building requires experiments. Wang Shu, in fact, says, “Right now, there is a testing building on the site. At the same time, the experiment results are shared everywhere in the villages in order to preserve them. We would like to have the citizens experience the value of the country and in turn the villagers regain confidence in the disappearing culture. In fact, we think Chinese villages represent the most important value in modern Chinese cities with their more natural and traditional way of living and working.”
They have proved over and over with other projects that they are able to transition comfortably from the monument to the city fabric. For the village we can therefore expect a careful balance between the individuality of a building and the ability to belong to a group, as they did with the Hangzhou Academy of Arts. To the museum they bring what Wang Shu calls the “accuracy of the feeling, more than the perfection of the construction,” as they did in the Ningbo Museum of History. There you don’t visit the building; you are struck by the building.
Preserving tradition for them is hardly an act of mere resistance. For them, traditional villages and old buildings have always been a valid and forceful source of knowledge. The use of ancient techniques is environmentally, socially, and culturally sustainable. What is new is the use of their prestige to influence political decisions that reflect their beliefs, which is the ultimate sign of professional integrity.