Ningbo Museum¶
The Ningbo Museum, which won a Pritzker prize for architect Wang
Shu last year, is a challenging edifice. Combining traditional
elements and materials with monumental modernism — in its most
uncompromisingly brutalist manifestation — it realizes a peculiar
complex of delicacy and terror.
Wang’s signature facades already display the same ambiguity in
embryo. His vast sheer planes, shown in the Ningbo Tengtou
pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (2010), memorialize a
demolished past. The bricks and tiles from obliterated villages
are recycled into exquisitely tessellated, endlessly absorbing
surfaces, sparsely punctuated by irregularly oriented and
distributed windows. The tension between crushing scale and
intricate composition is immense (and intimate). Subtle drifts of
texture and color from the non-uniform materials make the walls
into sensual displays of abstract pattern, whilst their massive
geometric rigor approaches a state of absolute menace (with
an unmistakable military-totalitarian edge).
In the structure of the Ningbo Museum, this tension is compounded to an almost hysterical pitch by a hybrid structure, fusing the flattened village mosaics with colossal blocks of comparatively homogeneous textured concrete. The building looks like a modern fortress, assembled in an architectural language of hard defensive pragmatism. Every aperture is pressurized in the direction of a slit, as if even minimal openings were a reluctant concession to weakness and vulnerability. For the landmark cultural institution of an open, commercial city, nestled deep within China’s traditionally pacific Jiangnan region, this structural vocabulary is jarring, and indubitably provocative. If it has a message, it is not easy to decrypt.
