La Biennale di Venezia has announced that architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu will curate the 20th International Architecture Exhibition, opening in May 2027. Founders of Amateur Architecture Studio and leading voices in contemporary practice, the duo is known for an approach rooted in craftsmanship, material reuse, and deep engagement with place. Their appointment brings renewed attention to vernacular knowledge, construction cultures, and the social realities shaping architecture today.
Established in 1997, Amateur Architecture Studio has become synonymous with a practice grounded in local memory, manual techniques, and the reuse of traditional materials. Alongside their built work, Wang and Lu have played a key role in architectural education in China, founding the Architecture Department at the China Academy of Art in 2003 and later the School of Architecture in 2007. Their projects—often described as mediations between past and present—foreground recycled materials, ordinary structures, and the ingenuity of artisans, advancing an architecture that emerges from its context rather than overriding it.
Their relationship with the Biennale dates back nearly two decades: they participated in the China Pavilion in 2006, received a Special Mention in the 2010 exhibition curated by Kazuyo Sejima, and returned in 2016 under Alejandro Aravena’s direction. Among their notable works are the Ningbo Historic Museum, the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, the Tiles Hill in Hangzhou, the Renovation of Wencun Village, and the Fuyang Cultural Complex. In 2012, Wang Shu became the first Chinese architect to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Related Article
The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Ends, Marking the Event’s Most Visited Edition
In their acceptance statement, Wang and Lu expressed concern over contemporary architectural trends “driven to extremes” and detached from real conditions, warning that such tendencies “will lead to the death of architecture.” They instead advocate for “a simple and true concept and method of architecture,” rooted in place, material history, and continuity.
“In the current world, the rapid and multiple changes in architecture are more a phenomenon of appearance, the result of excessive conceptualization or marked commercialization. Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality, and over-commercialization tends to be merely popular and short-lived. This phenomenon changes rapidly in order to survive, breaking away from the connection with the real place. It will lead to the death of architecture. Therefore, architecture becomes a kind of delusional expression about the future.” — Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu
President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco highlighted their “essential voice in the international debate on architecture and on the meaning of inhabiting the world’s spaces,” noting their ability to unite cultural responsibility with experimental thinking.
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu now join a long lineage of architects invited to lead the Architecture Department of La Biennale di Venezia, including Carlo Ratti, Lesley Lokko, Hashim Sarkis, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, Rem Koolhaas, and Kazuyo Sejima.
More info on La Biennale di Venezia.
