30/04/2026
INSPIRATION // In 2004, the Chinese architect Wang Shu won a competition to design a new museum in Ningbo. The site sat in a district where around thirty villages had recently been razed to make way for development — what Wang would later call a “no memory area.” Rather than start from a clean slate, he collected the rubble.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
The Ningbo History Museum opened in 2008. Its walls hold more than twenty kinds of brick, stone and tile salvaged from those villages, some dating to the Ming Dynasty, some over a thousand years old. They are laid using a regional technique called wapan — a method developed by farmers to rebuild after typhoons, packing mismatched fragments together with thin courses of lime mortar. The system is forgiving by design. It accepts whatever is to hand.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
By the time the project began, the technique had nearly been forgotten. Wang taught the local builders from old photographs, then gave them latitude to arrange the pieces themselves. The walls are, in effect, co-authored. No two stretches of facade repeat.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
It is, by any measure, one of the most material-efficient large buildings of the last twenty years - a thirty-thousand square metre museum clad in what was already there. But Wang rarely frames the project in those terms. For him, reuse is not a virtue to be claimed; it is simply the more honest way to build in a country tearing itself down at speed. The sustainability of the building is a consequence of taking its place seriously, not a feature added on top.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Wang has said he didn’t want to put tradition into a museum, because once tradition is housed in a museum, it is already dead. He wanted the building itself to keep it alive — its history, its craft, and the materials that carried both.
