Amateur Studio

Amateur Studio is a Chinese architects studio based in 1997 in Hangzhou founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu. In 2012 Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize.

Wang Shu (王澍)
Wang Shu was born on 4 November 1963 in Ürümqi. He began to draw and paint as a child, without any formal training in art. Despite the anti-intellectual fervor of the “cultural revolution” (1966–76), his mother gave him access to the library and he read widely, from “Pushkin to Lu Xun.” As a compromise between his passion of art and engineering, his parents’ recommendation, Wang chose to study architecture at the School of Architecture of Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province (previously named Nanjing Institute of Technology) and received a bachelor’s degree in 1985 and a master’s degree in 1988.

Although Wang lived in Ürümqi and Beijing in his early life, after college he moved to Hangzhou for the city’s natural landscapes and ancient tradition of art. He worked for the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) and in 1990 completed his first architectural project, a youth centre in the city of Haining near Hangzhou.

Wang did not have any commissions between 1990 and 1998. During that time his wife Lu Wenyu supported the family. Instead, he chose to further his studies at the School of Architecture of Tongji University in Shanghai, earning a PhD in 2000.

Lu Wenyu (陆文宇)
Lu Wenyu, born in 1967 grew up in Urumqi. Her school teacher who had been an architect taught her how to draw and encouraged her to apply to Nanjing’s Southeast University to study Architecture. Lu Wenyu studied architecture at Nanjing Institute of Technology.