Wang Shu Amateur Architecture Studio edited by Michael Juul Holm, Kjeld Kjeldsen, Mette Kallehauge
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art/Lars Müller Publishers, 2017
Hardcover, 240 pages

Wang Shu: Imagining the House by Wang Shu
Lars Müller Publishers, 2012
Paperback, 168 pages

Like their buildings, books on Wang Shu and Amateur Architecture Studio are a rarity. I own three books on the 2012 Pritzker Prize-winning architect, who runs the studio with his wife, Lu Wenyu; as far as I know there aren't any more. Two of the three books are published by Switzerland's Lars Müller Publishers; one collects sketches on six projects and the second presents nine projects through photographs and coinciding with an exhibition of the same at the Louisiana Museum of Art.
With its scarcity of color and photographs, Imagining the House is an architecture book for architects; this may seem meaningless (aren't all architecture books for architects") but it's clearly a book that architects will have a better chance appreciating and understanding than laypeople. A quick flip through the book reveals very little, though, since most of the 168 pages are gatefolds. This forces readers to be patient with the drawings, which are reproduced at the same size as the originals, and to take their time in learning about the projects through Wang Shu's hand and words. Each project is prefaced by a piece of heavyweight paper with a description on one side and captions to the numbered sketches...