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Según Wang Shu, su arquitectura produce una experiencia análoga a la que ofrece la contemplación de la pintura tradicional china. Esta se diferencia del arte occidental en que no trata de expresar la sensibilidad visual de su autor a través de la descripción de la luz, el espacio y los objetos. No define los temas a través del color sino perfilándolos con líneas oscuras y unas pocas tonalidades. El pintor no trabaja del natural; normalmente es, también, filósofo y poeta, además de dominar muchas otras disciplinas técnicas y humanísticas; vive aislado en los parajes elegidos antes de pintarlos, para captar el funcionamiento estructural del mundo natural del que forma parte y compartir después, a través de su arte, ese conocimiento. Provocar ese mismo tipo de vivencias es también para Wang Shu el principal propósito de su arquitectura. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Wang Shu, the experience generated by his architecture is analogous to the one of looking at Chinese traditional painting. Said discipline differs from Western art in that it does not seek to showcase the author's visual sensitivity through the description of light, objects and space. Nor does it define its subjects through colour, but by a combination of dark outlines and a few thinly laid hues. The painter, furthermore, does not work from life. He is also a philosopher, a poet and a master of a wide array of other technical and humanist fields of his time. Prior to painting a site, he lives there in solitary retreat and studies the constellation of universal structures and natural forces at play and be able to, later, share that knowledge through his art. It is producing that same type of experience that lies at the heart of Wang Shu's architecture's motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes an urban regeneration project in the historic old city center of Barcelona. Given the unsatisfactory outcome of all previous interventions on similar cases, the key decision here was to proceed according to an alternative strategy which would produce a proper response to some historical users vindications for the neighborhood regeneration such as maintaining the main essential features which have historically determined the site's character, as well as showing some respect for the historic memory of the inhabitants. Here, architectural design substitutes the usual urban planning tools both in previous analysis and exploration stages. Its starting point ignores all current regulations and only at the final stage, once the proper effectiveness of the project has been checked, those planning regulations are adapted to include the specificities of the new design. In this way, the usual design process sequence is inverted, so to avoid the frequent mistakes which occur due to excessive rigidity and lack of sensitivity in current urban planning regulation procedures when it comes to deal with so complex realities. In the initial analysis we give priority to all the graphic, sensitive, perceptive and experiential aspects. The article also introduces some unpublished materials from Enric Miralles' studio, author of the Santa Caterina urban planning project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]