#mad studio

Zuidas CBD proposal, Amsterdam

  Even before winning major competitions to design signature buildings for European capitals, the Financial Times none-too-subtly declared that Ma was well on his way to conquering the West back in 2011:

So far, the phenomenon of the starchitect has been all one-way traffic – the west exporting its genius to emerging cities keen to establish themselves as unmissable destinations across the globe. An opera house, a museum or a skyscraper to give credibility to a city that was hardly there a decade ago. Now the first architect to move the other way, from east to west, is returning the compliment by helping to put Mississauga on the map. The Canadian city has jazzed up its skyline by commissioning undulating twin residential towers – to be completed later this year – from China’s Ma Yansong.

It's fitting that Ma is a native of Beijing, which has seen the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid fundamentally reshape the capital with their landmark structures in recent years. Though I.M. Pei famously ruffled French feathers in 1989 with his Louvre Pyramid in Paris, Ma's designs are seeking to impact Europe on an entirely different scale.

After MAD Studio beat out 95 other global architects for the right to design a riverside housing complex in Paris, Ma's firm followed the accolade by submitting a winning proposal to redesign a residence near Rome's Villa Borghese district. The triumphs resulted in an invitation for MAD Studio to conceive of a new 200,000 square meter Zuidas business district in Amsterdam, a project which would significantly change the architectural character of the city upon completion.

Absolute World residential complex, Mississauga, Ontario (Completed 2011)

  Ma's first international success came in 2005, when the city of Mississauga, Ontario held a competition for architects to design a tower in the Absolute World residential complex. Ma's winning design called for a sensuously rounded tower, and initial interest in the 428-unit twisting residential building was so high that developers asked MAD Studio to create a 433-unit second building. 

"A high-rise building doesn't have to be a box," Ma explained.

The critical acclaim has been resolute, with the Absolute World project receiving awards from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, ArchDaily and Designboom, and also getting profiled in Domus and Icon. 

With the project in Canada and the various designs in Europe, it's not surprising that a recent profile from Der Spiegel openly asks if Ma will be the next Chinese architect to win a Pritzker:

"If there is one star architect in this generation [in China], Ma Yansong could be it," says Jeffrey Johnson of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, who adds that Ma is well-positioned to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in the future. "His more radical proposals are visionary, but also critiques," Johnson adds. "Yet they are also very optimistic proposals about the way to think about the future."

Ma certainly has the pedigree, after studying for a Master's in Architecture under Zaha Hadid at Yale. The school also happens to be the alma mater of Louis Kahn, who Ma claims as his architectural idol.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego. Designed by Louis Kahn 

  In 2012, Ma spoke to CNN and described a pilgrimage to his favorite building, Kahn's Salk Institute in San Diego:

"I arrived there at midnight...It was in the dark, so it looked different from the pictures -- everyone knows these pictures; you have the building on both sides and the ocean and sky in front -- but in the evenings, it's like a black hole."

"The end is a void and it's horizontal not vertical, so you don't feel you're small and helpless. When you're in that space you feel you're the center, and you can talk to your future."

The Financial Times reported further details about how Kahn's work influences Ma's quest for permanence in design:

“I actually feel like a very traditional architect...when I stand in a Kahn building I feel the same thrill as I think people must have felt 50 years ago, or as they will feel in 100 years. I want my buildings to do that. Architects now can be obsessed with diagrams, with studies and texts, perhaps because they’re not really sure what they want. Artists don’t feel the need to explain their work because in 100 years no one will read the texts.”

Shan-Shui City proposal, Guiyang, Guizhou 

  Like other architects working today, Ma is able to deliver nebulous 21st century structures that recall both the Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai's 2046 and the Shanghai of Rian Johnson's Looper. However, It is Ma's incorporation of nature in a fundamental rather than ornamental way that makes his work unique.

Speaking to the Creators Project in 2010, Ma declared that "Architecture and nature is a wholeness you cannot separate." Rather than merely featuring a green rooftop on a relatively conventional building, Ma's designs for the Urban Forest concept in Chongqing, the Huangshan Mountain Village in Anhui, and the Fake Hills project in Beihai all integrate greenery throughout the different floors and various spaces as essential aspects of the overall design. 

Even when he works exclusively with steel and glass, Ma strives to incorporate natural rhythms into his work. When discussing the Absolute World towers to the New York Times in 2011, Ma said that he thought “maybe North American cities need something more organic, more natural, more human.” 

Fake Hills proposal, Beihai, Guangxi

  Paradoxically, Ma considers embracing artificiality as a means of getting in tune with nature. Ma talked about how his childhood in Beijing directly influencing his ideas about design with CNN:

"I'm trying to express nature in big cities. I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden -- the Forbidden City -- and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial."

"I think that's a good pattern for future cities. There must be a way to combine the high rise and high density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky. We can link different buildings in the sky, and we can have a waterfall in a high rise. It would be beautiful."

Perhaps a mountain built on a rooftop could accompany that waterfall?

Tiananmen Square from the Beijing 2050 proposal  

  It is that focus on nature, and bold proposals for the redefinition of national psychic nerve centers like Ground Zero in New York and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, that have led to him being called "the most utopian architect working in China today" by Daisy Guo, project manager for the China Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale for architecture.

Concerning the concrete space in the middle of the Chinese universe, Ma says that "Tiananmen Square is a symbol of the empire." Der Spiegel directly makes the point that MAD Studio's Beijing 2050 proposal to green the square would "subvert that heavy symbolism," with Ma adding, "If this really happened, it would change all of China." 

More evidence of Ma's idealism from an interview with China Economic Review:

"The reason I came back [to China] was that I see a lot of challenges, urban challenges. I think the problems are what attracted me...I believe being an architect in China, I can use architecture as a tool to respond to social issues and cultural issues." 

And from the Creators Project:

"As an architect you control lots of resources to build buildings, and those buildings influence society. We build them step by step, and they influence our society little by little. Eventually they become historical trends. 

From the Shan-Shui City Exhibition @ WUHAO Curated Shop, Beijing

  Another major feature of Ma's work is the specific Chinese cultural essence of his designs. But rather than a simple recreation or slight retooling of traditional forms, Ma goes deeper to use elements that at once evoke a classic Chinese aesthetic while looking entirely new.

There's the rice paddy hillside structure that Tony Stark might feel comfortable calling home, and also a variety of designs from the Shan-Shui City exhibition, including a Guiyang CBD design that resembles mountain scenery from Chinese landscape paintings.

Like the contemporary artist Xu Bing, whose A Book From the Sky work involved tens of thousands of new original Chinese characters that merely resembled the real thing, Ma is inventing a design language that resembles Chinese culture while going beyond the normal bounds of tradition.

A Book From The Sky by Xu Bing (1987)

  However, despite all the lofty ideas, the overarching thing Ma and MAD Studio are apparently striving for is livability. In the China Economic Review, Ma said that he hoped to achieve "very high quality living environments",  instead of only high quality building products:

"In later times, when China opened its doors, there were more market-driven buildings. So they look like commercial goods, they look like products in the shopping mall. They look different because they have become the symbols of capital."

"Those buildings they didn’t really build for people. They didn’t really choose how people were involved in those buildings, and they were very much focused on the look...Right now is a turning point, because people are talking about green buildings, sustainable buildings and public buildings as open spaces."

"China needs a new idea for its cities and architecture...We know that this urbanization thing is huge in China. It would be a pity if after all this there was nothing new."

From the Financial Times: 

“The first wave of cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen were built quickly and there is a realisation that mistakes were made. So they’re tearing them down. People think that buildings are permanent but in China this isn’t true, we can always demolish and remake it better.”