Since early in his career, when he worked on construction sites and got hands-on experience with vernacular building methods, Wang Shu has drawn inspiration from traditional Chinese attitudes toward architecture’s place within the larger context of landscape. So he and Lu Wenyu, his wife and partner in Amateur Architecture Studio, were logical choices to design the Huang Gongwang Museum, named after an important landscape painter who lived from 1269 to 1354. Located in Fuyang, about 20 miles southwest of Hangzhou, where Wang and Lu practice, the 160,000-square-foot museum honors one of the “Four Masters of the Yuan Dynasty,” whose work influenced Chinese artists for centuries. Appropriately, Huang painted one of his most famous works, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, in the vicinity of the new building. Part of an assemblage of buildings dressed in rugged masonry and topped by multipeaked roofs, the museum resembles a village or a range of mountains, evoking community and geology in equal measure.

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