A friend who recently returned from China remarked that the country reflects the past, present, and future, all at the same time. In smog-choked Beijing, where the 15th-century Temple of Heaven is still a beloved and much-visited oasis, the eye-popping, epic-scale works of contemporary architecture—the CCTV headquarters by OMA, the Bird’s Nest by Herzog & de Meuron—announce that the future is already here.

But the latest Pritzker laureate, Chinese architect Wang Shu, has some issues with that future, and he used his platform during the award ceremony in Beijing a month ago to criticize the way his country has responded to economic growth, questioning the sweeping “demolition and new construction” in its rapidly expanding cities and the reliance on “gigantic and iconic architecture.” Citing Wang for architecture with a “strong sense of cultural continuity and reinvigorated tradition,” the Pritzker jury seemed to concur—though the prize has been awarded in the past to designers most famous for the kind of iconic buildings Wang decried. Some of those architects, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Jean Nouvel, were in the audience listening to Wang speak.