Novelistic essay: on the form of Wang Shu’s PhD thesis, ‘Fictionalising Cities’

In 2012 the Chinese architect Wang Shu won the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize. Since then, his buildings and his architectural thinking have received increasing international attention. Among his many written works, Wang’s PhD thesis ‘Fictionalising Cities’ – completed in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Jiwei Lu at Tongji University in Shanghai – is widely considered the definitive statement of his architectural thought and methodology. It comprises a structuralist study of the city and its architecture, doing so through the development of two key themes. The first is Wang’s theoretical discussion of the application of structuralist-semiotic approaches to architecture, urban research, and other areas in the humanities, and the second is his reading of the Chinese city and China’s landscape architecture tradition in the light of this theoretical discussion. Wang believes that traditional Chinese cities have their own structure, components and rules of combination, and refers to them as instances of ‘texture city’ ( ), a term that proposes an analogy between Roland Barthes’s notion of text and the city, both of which are understood as a ‘fabric of signifiers’.