Yansong Ma likes buildings to float. He likes them to bend and swivel and – he hopes, one day – to shoot up from mushroom-like stems and spread out in horizontal disks across the sky. It is not only the Chinese landscape that Ma, a 32-year-old architect from Beijing, wants to transform. It’s the Chinese notion of creativity itself.
Until a year and a half ago, no developer in China – where the biggest, fastest building boom in human history is taking place – would touch one of Ma’s utopian plans. But when in May 2006 an international jury chose Ma’s shimmering, twisting, 56-storey residential design to be built in Mississauga, Canada, it made him China’s first architect to win a competition overseas. All the 500 units in the Absolute Tower – dubbed the “Marilyn Monroe building” for its smooth, gyrating curves – sold in a day, prompting Ma to design a second, smaller building that also sold out instantly.
The project brought Ma immediate fame in China. Now, with a dozen designs in the works at home and abroad, the young architect stands at the forefront of his generation – beside established names like Chang Yung Ho and Xu Tiantian – helping to build the new Chinese century. And Ma hopes to make pyschological changes at the same time.
When I meet Ma on a recent Saturday evening in Beijing, he looks anything but an urban star. Slender-built with a long face, sleepy eyes and a thin patch of hair growing on his chin and upper lip, he is wearing a frayed, v-neck T-shirt and black sweatpants as he shuffles in plastic slippers around his office. I get an urgent rundown of his philosophy.
“There’s no context for what is happening in China right now,” he says about the building craze that has overwhelmed his country. He walks me past several models. One is a tube-filled, angle-free fish tank. Another is a not-yet-approved redesign of Copenhagen’s train station, in which the tracks have been covered by an outdoor public plaza, through which a series of punctuated holes allows light and sound to travel freely. “People talk about the Olympics – [but] that’s not a real future,” Ma continues. “When society grows too fast and is too focused on the thing right in front, and not in the distance, that’s a problem.”
The root of this problem, he explains, is China’s growth model itself: a bloated, copycat version of the west that promotes cost-efficient high-rises with conservative designs at the expense of fresh talent and creativity. “Chinese architecture is easy, technical work,” he says. “It’s not inventive. The government and marketing have already decided the attitude of the buildings – that’s why there’s no imagination, no utopian or ideological work from the designer.”
This is what Ma, with his futuristic floor plans, set out to change. After a Masters degree in 2002 from the Yale School of Architecture, he worked for such prestigious firms as Eisenman Architects in New York and Zaha Hadid in London before he returned to China. He taught architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and in 2004, he founded the company MAD (short for Ma Design). Over the next two years Ma entered his designs in more than 100 competitions, winning several, although none was ever built. When the Absolute Tower project was signed, his trajectory shot upward with the building. He won the Architecture League of New York’s 2006 Young Architect Award; he exhibited a design collection called “MAD in China” at the Venice Biennale (it is showing at the Danish Architectural Center in Copenhagen until January 6); and he embarked on a global lecturing circuit.
MAD now employs 40 people and recently opened an office in Tokyo to become China’s first internationally based architecture firm. There are plans to open another office in Dubai during the Tokyo Island “World” project that Ma has been commissioned to build. So what exactly is Ma seeking to change?
To begin with, he wants to abandon the vertical, cubic skyscraper look for more fluid, less rigid structures that better reflect modern China’s urban issues, such as population density and resource exhaustion. An admirer of Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus tradition, Ma envisions a landscape of horizontal, organic and above all human-friendly buildings that appear, in one instance, as giant saucers propped on stilts high into the sky, vast, wave-like disks that will contain woods and artificial lakes.The trick is to go with basic latex cheap viagra ones and not the variants with dots, else it’ll just beat the primary reason (some even have patterns inside). The buildup of plaque in the penile arteries may also reduce the coronary arteries and cause a person to earn more of enhanced penile erection. viagra cheap sale ? A question which is answered by millions of men who have used it once or before swear by its hundred percent result. cialis tablet In constituent, a friend or an individual who has been driving for respective years may not recognize that how many minutiae a new driver completes the DATA course, they should then pass a 40 question Florida DMV test that addresses the road rules and road signs. Unani physician maintains online pharmacy cialis a healthy atmosphere.
Perhaps his most visionary, politically daring design is part of a series he calls “Beijing 2050”: a blueprint for transforming Tiananmen Square into a sprawling, forested parkland. Converting the world’s largest square into a People’s Park would have major repercussions on Chinese culture, he explained, because people – not monuments, not the Communist Party – would be at the nation’s centre. “This space records the history of China. If this space can change, [all of] China can change,” Ma says.
Although plans like these can still only be considered imaginary at best, many of Ma’s buildings currently in construction reach towards that “utopian” realm. His curving, sharkfin-shaped hotel and luxury apartment buildings on Sanya’s Phoenix Island will form part of the 2008 Olympic Games’ torch running event. His 330-metre-tall Sinosteel International Plaza in Tianjin, with its honeycomb façade, is to be China’s first major state-owned company headquarters designed by a national architect. And the immense, amorphous Erdos Museum in Erdos, China, the atrium-filled, Gaudiesque house known as the Denmark Pavilion and the glass-built, floating Guangzhou Clubhouse all bear Ma’s idealistic and idiosyncratic stamp.
Inspired by innovators like Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog, Ma is convinced that China must look ahead rather than backward to rediscover, and in a sense recreate, its culture.
“My understanding of Chinese tradition is as a creative, adventurous spirit – tradition does not just mean copying old shapes,” he says. But he feels that decades, even centuries, of pressure from government and from society have worn the Chinese sense of creativity down to the point that “people don’t think they should have their own personal opinions and attitudes. People are afraid of identity”.
This translates, he adds, into a culture where everything – not only its architecture, but its movies, its products and technology, even its literature – is “Made in China”, while almost nothing is invented there. Chinese culture can no longer pretend to ignore buildings as a form of expression.
“We have so many challenges and problems in everyday life, and the architecture has to be sensitive to that,” says Ma. From the vantage point of his post-1989 generation, which grew up with more liberated social values than those of the past, perhaps it is only natural that Ma feels like revolutionising the way his country gets constructed.
“I like floating. I like the unstable feeling. I like the curve,” he tells me, putting on a black cotton jacket to go out for dinner. I take one last look at his “Beijing 2050” design: of the city in the air. It seems a long way from where we are now – but not altogether impossible. It’s in this imagined Chinese future, Ma claims, that “we are discovering ourselves.”
“It’s not architecture. It’s an ideal.”