ON the outskirts of Hangzhou, the Fuchun River snakes through foothills, as it has done for thousands of years. The natural surroundings evoked the beauty of ancient landscapes until urban development intervened.

Brick houses began popping up, first dotting the environment and then blanketing it. Nature is being relentlessly swallowed up by trendy, often contrived residential housing.

Hangzhou-based architect Wang Shu calls these structures “American-style country houses” and says they are destroying iconic Chinese villages. He is equally scathing about the renovation of old village houses in a “fake antique” style.

That, of course, is a popular trend across China. Once forgotten villages are seeking to reinvent themselves into mock replicas of the past to boost local tourism and to cater to the demand of urbanites who want “quaint” countryside homes.

Wang, 52, is dean of the School of Architecture at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. In 2012, he was the first Chinese national to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often called “the Nobel Prize of architecture.”

Shortly after winning the award, he embarked on the Wen Village rescue project in the city of Fuyang, about a two-hour drive from the center of Hangzhou. He recently unveiled 24 houses he designed for the project.

“This is my attempt to experiment with a different kind of urbanization for Chinese villages,” he told Shanghai Daily in a recent interview in Fuyang. “I am exploring possibilities to rescue these villages, and I still don’t know if I am succeeding.”

Each of the 24 three-story houses, arrayed in two rows, is distinct from one another. They showcase Wang’s signature aesthetic style, using recycled materials in designs inspired from traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The homes integrate with their natural surroundings.

The houses were constructed on empty land at the end of the old section of the village. They stand in stark contrast to communities of American-style country homes in a new area across town.

Shi Shuilian and her husband, both in their 60s, were among the residents in Wen Village who won a lottery to buy the houses designed by the “very famous big name architecture master.”

It’s proven to be a whole new experience in living. Shi said she appreciates the big kitchen, where she spends a lot of time. However, that’s not to say that the family didn’t have some of its own ideas. Part of the yard has been turned into a dining room by a local man handy with carpentry tools.

The changes they have made to the home are small compared with alterations of some of their neighbors, who hired a company that specializes in “renovating high-end luxurious countryside mansions,” according to the company advertising spiel.

“Of course, I was well aware of the challenges before I undertook this project,” Wang explains. “Any normal, sane architect wouldn’t take a project like this, where you have to deal with multiple property owners instead of one. And Chinese villagers are the most difficult owners you would ever run into. You can neither accept nor ignore all their demands or complaints. One needs some social skills to handle it all.”

Wang, obviously, is not considered a “normal” architect. The Pritzker jury, in announcing the award, cited his role in trying to harmonize the traditions of the past with the future needs of sustainable urban development.

Wang has long had the reputation of something of a rebel in his profession. His sharp criticism of what he calls “soulless” buildings across China is as well known as his masterpiece designs.

He refers to himself as a full-time intellectual and only an amateur architect. To press the point, the studio he co-founded with his architect wife Lu Wenyu is named Amateur Architecture Studio.

“I don’t want to have to depend on taking projects to survive, but rather, I want to work on projects that charm me and maintain my passion for architecture,” he says. “Every house I build is one I would like to live in.”

The city Fuyang is famous for landscape painter Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), who spent his last years living there among the foothills.

Fuyang authorities asked Wang to design an art museum honoring Huang. It seemed an obvious choice after accolades about his previous work, which included the Ningbo Museum, the Xiangshan campus of the China Academy of Art and Tengtou Pavilion at World Expo 2010 Shanghai.

In return for work on the museum, Wang requested some village land to build houses for local residents.

“I was tough,” he says. “I said I would not take on the museum project without the promise of the land.”

He led a team to research hundreds of villages in the area. They chose four and developed a 10-year plan for each. The 24 houses in Wen Village are merely the beginning of a long-term project.

“It was quite sad,” he says of the field research. “Most of these villages we visited were beyond saving. Old houses had already been demolished, replaced by huge new ones that remained empty. Wen Village is still salvageable because the old town is pretty much intact, with the new houses on the other side of town. There were still traces of old-style Chinese villages there. It had not been completely turned into all American-style country houses yet.”

Wang says he is endeavoring to revive the aesthetics expressed in ancient Chinese paintings and poems through bricks and stone. Traditional aesthetics, for him, represent a higher moral ground, with respect for nature.

According to Wang, villagers today tend to build large houses, leaving little space in between. That means houses in the second or third rows often don’t get much sunlight. In the past, village houses were not laid out so evenly or densely. His houses in Wen Village leave larger outdoor spaces.

“We built 24 houses on a piece of land that would have held only 15 houses if built by villagers themselves,” he says. “I think it’s a more environmentally friendly use of land.”

Some villagers embraced his ideas. Others complained that large outdoor spaces resulted in smaller rooms than they wanted.

“We made a 10-year plan for four villages, but now I see that it will take more than that — maybe an entire generation — to change attitudes,” Wang says. “I will follow up closely on the projects to see what works and what doesn’t. Projects like this take more than just an architect. What I have done is limited. I would never want to force villagers to accept my ideas.”

His origins as a purveyor of architectural heritage were humble. Wang was born in the far western city of Urumqi. He began drawing as a child and was an avid reader of both Chinese and Western classics. Torn between a passion for art and engineering, he enrolled in architecture at what was then the Nanjing Institute of Technology, receiving his master’s degree in 1988.

He became a professor at the China Academy of Art in 2000 and became dean of the School of Architecture there in 2007.

Wang’s admiration for China’s traditional lifestyle and landscape paintings is well reflected in the design for the new Huang Gongwang Museum in Fuyang. The main building has opened to public, with work still underway on landscaping.

“It’s more than just a museum,” Wang explains. “It includes six or seven indoor and outdoor venues where public events like concerts can be held. The essence of Chinese landscape art is to guide viewers into a painting so they imagine the experience of hiking, climbing and looking at vistas from the top of mountains.”

The rooftop of the museum will recreate that sensation in a design evoking the shape of clouds.

“The museum is unique in the way that it features Chinese landscape paintings,” Gao Shiming, vice president of the China Academy of Art and curator of the museum’s opening exhibition, tells Shanghai Daily. “The architecture serves the purpose well, and now it is up to us to carry on that purpose in future exhibitions.”