Today's arts section in The New York Times has an article about Wang Shu who won this year's Pritzker Prize. His architecture uses rough and sustainable materials and the shapes are sometimes simple, sometimes sculptural and complex like the Ningbo History Museum (pictured above, image from the About.com: Architecture site). Though I like this building for itself, I also like its evocation of new brutalism.
The Times article:
There has been critical press about the selection of Wang Shu as an individual even though his work is done in collaboration with his wife Lu Wenyu. Marcia Thorne, the Pritzker Prize's executive director, is quoted in the April 2012 issue of Architectural Record as saying that the prize committee looked at the individual as well as the team and decided that Wang Shu was "exceptional and worthy of the prize."
It has been great over the past few months to be doing my latest gig: indexing for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. There too, I sometimes debate with myself about individual versus firm access points. As Weinberger said: both/and; it doesn't need to be either/or ... except perhaps for the Pritzker. Christie and I were talking the other day on the phone about the irreplaceable delight of working (being) in a good architecture or art library and having the periodicals at the ready for perusing. It's nice to have Architectural Record, Old-house Journal, Metropolis, others on the "to do" stack rather than the "when I've got time" stack.
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