© Su Shengliang. Stage of Forest, Ji Lin
Architect Wang Shuo was born in 1981 in Beijing. He grew up in the family of neuroscientists and was particularly good in math, wining the national math Olympics in high school. But instead of going into computer science, as did many of his classmates, he decided to study architecture. The decision was entirely intuitive. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2004. The Master’s degree was acquired from Rice University in Houston in 2006. His thesis was called Wild Beijing, in which he focused on the emergence of spontaneous urbanism in Beijing. After completing his training, Wang worked for one year at Peter Gluck’s firm GLUCK+ in New York. The office is known for specializing in hands-on design-built projects and acting as general contractor, which gives the architects a lot of control over quality of construction. Following Wang’s time in America, he relocated to Europe for two years, working at OMA in Rotterdam where he interacted with Rem Koolhaas, working particularly on projectsб in which various layers of social, cultural, and everyday life were overlapped to create active, truly contemporary spaces.