CHINA has no shortage of modern architectural landmarks, from the Guangzhou Opera House to Beijing’s National Stadium. But most of them have been spearheaded by foreign “starchitects” enabled by government funding — such as Iraq’s Zaha Hadid, Switzerland’s Herzog & De Meuron and the Netherlands’ Rem Koolhaas, to name a few.

    But Chinese architecture may have reached a turning point with Monday’s announcement of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Award winner: architect Wang Shu, the first Chinese national to receive the prestigious award.

    The official awards ceremony will take place May 25, when it will be held for the first time in Beijing — a location decided in October, long before the winner was known.

    The prize, founded in Chicago in 1979 by the Pritzker family synonymous with the Hyatt Hotel Group, often is likened to architecture’s Nobel, the Scandinavian award that the Pritzker was modeled after. Pritzker winners receive a US$100,000 grant.

    “The fact that an architect from China has been selected by the jury represents a significant step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals,” said Thomas J. Pritzker, head of the Hyatt Foundation, in announcing the prize. “In addition, over the coming decades China’s success at urbanization will be important to China and to the world. This urbanization, like urbanization around the world, needs to be in harmony with local needs and culture.”

    Zhu Tao, a University of Hong Kong architecture critic and historian who was born in Shandong Province and has practiced as an architect in cities across China, said Wang’s victory could inspire national pride.

    “All of a sudden, Wang Shu is proving that we can produce quality work ourselves,” Zhu said. “China makes up a fifth of the world’s population, but many Chinese architects don’t have confidence in their work.”

    For young architects working in the context of explosive urban growth, he added, the prize “sends a message that architecture is a cultural enterprise, not just a commercial enterprise, and that architects are creators of culture. That’s very meaningful.”

    The remaking of China’s urban landscape by outsiders has led to hand-wringing in both the Western and Chinese press over Chinese architects’ lack of visibility. Against that background, Wang Wei, a professor of architecture at Southwest Jiaotong University, confessed she was surprised by Wang Shu’s Pritzker triumph.

    “I say ‘surprised’ because I thought it would take many more years for a Chinese architect to win this award,” Wang Wei said. “Considering that the study of architecture didn’t really begin to develop in China until after the 1980s, it’s on the fast side.”

    The 48-year-old Wang Shu was born in Urumqi, in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. He’s a relatively young Pritzker laureate, Wang Wei added. By contrast, I.M. Pei — who was born in Guangzhou in 1917, before the People’s Republic of China was established, and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in the mid-1950s and spent most of his career there — won the award in his 60s.

    Wang Shu established his Hangzhou-based firm, Amateur Architecture Studio, in 1997 with his wife, Lu Wenyu. He strives to develop a new language for Chinese architecture, fusing modernist forms with salvaged materials that draw from China’s culture and history. His Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, for instance, reconstructs a former port building, while his Xingshan Campus for Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art is roofed with 2 million tiles collected from traditional houses.(SD-Agencies)