In 2023, the School of Design Building at Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its doors after a complete remodeling and adaptation of an existing structure. Designed by architect and scholar Xing Ruan, who also serves as Dean of the school, the building went on to receive two recognitions at the Prix Versailles: the World Title of the Most Beautiful Campus and the Special Prize for an Interior, one of the three major honors of the competition. Awards of this kind tend to generate their own momentum. Once a building is recognized, it is quickly placed within a convenient narrative — its materials, techniques, form, and spatial decisions all assigned meanings that make the project legible, categorizable, and easy to cite.
Yet what an award confirms is perhaps only that a building has been seen. What remains worth asking is why it exists in the way that it does — what problems it was made to address, what beliefs it refuses, and what it proposes about the discipline beyond the occasion of its construction. It was in the School of Design Building itself that the following interview took place, moving between architecture, scholarship, frugality, and the limits of what buildings can — and should — be asked to do.
