Hasta La Ideas

Ma Yansong of Chinese studio MAD presents a masterplan for Nanjing, China, where buildings are designed to look like mountains and public spaces overlap with the natural landscape, as part of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

The Nanjing Zendai Thumb Plaza proposal is the latest in a series of projects by MAD based on Yansong’s Shan-Shui City concept – an urban strategy based on a style of Chinese landscape painting and named after the Chinese words for mountains and water.

The masterplan, which encompasses an area of approximately 60 hectares, envisions an assortment of buildings and spaces that mediate between the city’s urban centre and its surrounding landscape of mountains and lakes.

“We need to rethink how to define the boundary between the nature and the urban on this piece of empty plot in the new city development area,” says MAD. “Is it possible to combine the high-density city with the atmosphere of the nature to create an energetic urban public space for the future, so people will reconnect their emotion with the nature?”

Expected to complete by 2017, the masterplan includes a set of high-rise buildings with unique curving profiles intended to avoid the “height competition” associated with most skyscrapers.

At ground level, pathways and plazas will be integrated with a mixture of manmade and natural landscaping.

Yansong is exhibiting a scale model of the proposal at the Border Warehouse in Shenzhen for the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013.

Here’s a project description from MAD:

Ma Yansong Featuring ‘Nanjing Zendai Thumb Plaza’ in Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013 in Shenzhen

Ma Yansong presented his work, ‘Shanshui Experiment Complex’ in the Border Warehouse of Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013 in Shenzhen. This is an artwork in-between architecture model and landscape installation, created based on MAD’s latest project, ‘Nanjing Zendai Thumb Plaza’. The total area of this urban design project is about 600,000 sqm and it is expected to be completed in 2017.

The historic city Nanjing is famous for the mountain and water landscape around the city, as well as its modern prosperities. With the culture, nature and history considered, we need to rethink how to define the boundary between the nature and the urban on this piece of empty plot in the new city development area. Is it possible to combine the high-density city with the atmosphere of the nature to create an energetic urban public space for the future, so people will re-connected their emotion with the nature?

The installation approaches those issues by creating a green open space spreading on the ground level of the city, where the natural and man-made landscape cross over with each other, existing in different dimensions both indoors and outdoors. The clear boundary of the site thus becomes blurred. While walking to their urban destination, people will feel as if they are sometimes walking in the nature. Above that, a series of buildings rise in the fog with flowing lines, changing smoothly as integrity, resolving the vertical power and the height competition, and the city skyline that used to be controlled by technology and power is now back to the artistic mood of faraway-so-close that our ancients have perceived in the nature.

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A hotel shaped like a giant horseshoe by Ma Yansong of Beijing studio MAD is set to open later this year on the edge of a lake in Huzhou, China.

The Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort was designed by MAD as a pair of curvaceous towers that connect on the upper levels to create an arched profile. Located on the edge of Taihu Lake, the building’s iconic shape is reflected in the still waters.

Architect Ma Yansong says the form was inspired by the traditional bridges depicted in old Chinese paintings.

“Throughout China’s history, people have always pursued a harmonious relationship with nature and this has become a major part of Chinese culture and tradition,” he said. “Huzhou itself is a place famous for traditional ink paintings and splendid water views, and the arch bridge is one of the key elements of traditional architecture.”

He added: “By incorporating this iconic ring-shape, my goal was to design a contemporary resort that seamlessly integrates with the surrounding environment while evoking the beautiful arch bridge over Taihu Lake.”

The 27-storey building contains a total of 282 guest rooms, but also encompasses 39 villas with access to hot springs. Additional facilities are contained within separate buildings and offer a variety of restaurants, a ballroom, conference suites and a wedding centre.

Although some rooms are already available, the building will officially open in December.

Other projects completed by MAD in the last year include an icicle-shaped museum for wooden sculptures in northeast China and a pair of curvaceous twisted skyscrapers in Canada.

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News: Chinese architect Ma Yansong has revealed plans for a mixed-use complex in Beijing featuring skyscrapers, office blocks and public spaces modelled on mountains, hills and lakes.

Yansong, who leads Beijing studio MAD, designed the urban development for a site on the edge of Chaoyang Park, one of the largest city parks in the world. Rather than creating an obstacle between the city and the green space, the architect wanted to design buildings that bring the two districts together.

“By taking the natural beauty of lakes and mountains, the architectural complex can be read as a futuristic city landscape painting,” explained the designers. “High-rise buildings act as the peaks, individual office buildings as the slope, high-end offices as the ridge and residential buildings as mountain ranges, in combination with classical landscape elements like lakes, springs, forest, streams, valleys, rocks and peaks.”

Two skyscrapers overlooking the park will tower above the surrounding buildings, boasting striated volumes that reference organic rock formations.

The design is based on Yansong’s ongoing Shan-Shui City concept, which proposes a kind of architecture and urbanism that is influenced by nature and emotion, enabling city dwellers to reconnect with the natural world. The concept was first developed in the 1980s by Chinese scientists.

“The whole architectural complex does not look like it is ‘built’, but growing up naturally from its surrounding environment and recreating a new Shan-Shui space typology,” added the studio.

MAD presented the Shan-Shui City concept in an exhibition at the WUHAO store in Beijing at the start of the summer.

The studio has also recently released proposals for an art museum set in caves on an artificial island, as well as a village of towering apartment blocks beside the Huangshan Mountains.

See more architecture by MAD »
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Here’s the full announcement from MAD:

Ma Yansong’s latest design, Chaoyang Park project was launched at Times Square in New York city

At 6pm New York time, September 5th of 2013, a green building with distinct Oriental features designed by Ma Yansong was launched at Times Square in New York city. Located along the lake of Beijing Chaoyang Park, this city complex is the continuation “Shan-Shui City” – a design concept Ma Yansong has been pursuing. It is a new interpretation of China’s ancient natural philosophy in contemporary city. In this typical CBD area that is flooded with extreme-modernism buildings, Ma Yansong aims at infusing the vigorous Shan-Shui culture into the new urbanisation with this “Chao Yang Park” project.

Since this project is adjacent to the world’s second-largest city park, Ma Yansong hopes that it will not become the boundary that separates the park and the city. On the contrary, by introducing the Shan-shui elements into the design, the building and the park is to be merged into a whole landscape, so to have the nature extending into the city, and to create a land of idyllic beauty in the city. The design starts with the understanding that the park is part of the plot: by taking the natural beauty of lakes and mountains, the architectural complex can be read as a futuristic city landscape painting in which high-rise buildings act as the peaks, individual office buildings as the slope, high-end offices as the ridge and residential buildings as mountain ranges in combination with classical landscape elements like lakes, springs, forest, streams, valleys, rocks and peaks. As a result, the whole architectural complex does not look like they are “built” but growing up naturally from its surrounding environment and they recreate a new Shan-Shui space typology. People can feel both the grandeur of the holistic landscape and its exquisite inside scenery.

This project is an ecological complex mainly functions as offices and residential buildings. However, it goes beyond the usual concept of green building. It is a Chinese-featured green building developed with the “spirit of green”. What Ma Yansong concerns a lot about is to seek the new direction of contemporary architecture and city from the traditional culture. This also decides if Chinese architecture can find its own way for future urban development. The simulation of the landscape of an international metropolis should take over the traditional Shan-Shui spirit and restore the natural traditional values followed with the innovation of architectural forms and the transformation of urban structures. In conformity with this idea, Ma Yansong will proceed with his exploration and practice of Shan-Shui City.

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Ma Yansong of Chinese studio MAD is exhibiting architectural models and sculptures in a Beijing courtyard to illustrate his vision for a future city inspired by nature and shaped by human emotion (+ slideshow).

The exhibition centres around an architectural model of Shanshui City, a new urban development proposed by MAD for Guiyang, China. Inspired by a concept first developed in the 1980s by Chinese scientists, the city is named after the Chinese words for mountains and water and is intended as a model of how cities and their inhabitants can reconnect with the natural world.

In an accompanying book, Ma Yansong explains: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment.”

The Shanshui City exhibition also contains more than 20 models and artworks added to further demonstrate the importance of nature and human emotion in architecture. They include a skyscraper with gardens on every level and a village of apartments blocks in the Huangshan Mountains.

All of the models are nestled amongst bamboo stems, stone walls and pools of water in the Qing Dynasty courtyard garden of the WUHAO design store in Beijing, which houses seasonal installations by young designers and brands.

Ma Yansong leads MAD alongside partners Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano. See more architecture by MAD on Dezeen, including a museum for wooden sculptures and a pair of curvaceous twisted skyscrapers.

Read on for more information from MAD:

Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” Book Launch and Exhibition Held in Beijing

On June 6, 2013, Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” exhibition officially opened; the exhibition is displayed in a Qing Dynasty courtyard garden at Wu Hao in Beijing. More than twenty architectural models and works of art are scattered around the ancient courtyard. Among rocks, screen walls, bamboo groves, pools of water and beneath the sky, the scale of each piece varies and collectively they form a futuristic utopian urban landscape.

The pieces on display range from a fish tank to the conceptual model of the “Shanshui City” which represents a proposal of hundreds of thousands of square metres in size. All the pieces exhibited express the sentiment of humans towards nature and depict the “Shanshui City” as the social ideal of the future. The newly issued book “Shanshui City” – released simultaneously with the exhibition – is an important turning point for Ma Yansong’s ten years of architectural practice and theory.

In the book, he says: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment. The emotional harmonious relationship between nature and man will be rebuilt upon the ‘Shanshui City.'” This small brochure illustrates the young Chinese architect’s ideals concerning futuristic habitation. “It would be a great pity if the vigorous urbanisation could not breed new urban civilisation and ideal.”

The famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen proposed the concept of “Shanshui City” in the 1980s. In view of the emerging large-scale cement construction, he put forward a new model of urban development based on Chinese Shanshui spirit, which was meant to allow people to “stay out of nature and return to nature.”

However, this idealistic urban concept was not put into practice. As the world’s largest manufacturing base, a large number of soulless “shelf cities” appeared in contemporary China due to the lack of cultural spirit.

Qian Xuesen pointed out that modern cities’ worship of power and capital leads to maximisation and utilitarianism. “Buildings in cities should not become living machines. Even the most powerful technology and tools can never endow the city with a soul.”

To Ma Yansong, Shanshui does not just refer to nature; it is also the individual’s emotional response to the surrounding world. “Shanshui City” is a combination of city density, functionality and the artistic conception of natural landscape. It aims at composing a future city that takes human spirit and emotion at their cores.

In the opening forum of “Shanshui City,” a round-table dialogue was held with the participation of Liu Xiaochun, Li Xianting, Bao Pao, Wang Mingxian, Jin Qiuye and Ma Yansong, leading to be, undoubtedly, a historic moment. Perhaps the “Shanshui City” ideology is the very progress that China’s urbanisation can contribute to the world.

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Chinese firm MAD has completed a pair of curvaceous twisted skyscrapers in the growing city of Mississauga, Canada (+ slideshow).

Standing at 170 and 150 metres, the Absolute Towers contain apartments on each of their oval-shaped floors, but every storey is incrementally rotated to give both buildings a curved and twisted outline.

“The concept of the tower at the beginning was very simple,” said MAD founder Ma Yansong. “We just wanted to make something organic but different, more natural and more soft and not something too strong that would remind people of money or power.”

Mississauga first developed as a suburb of Toronto but has grown in recent decades and was named as a city in 1974. Since then, high-rise developments have sprung up across the city and the architects were keen to avoid designing another of these “listless, boxy buildings”.

“Lots of cities like this are happening in China, just repeating the modern urban typology and always making square towers,” added Yansong. “We were thinking; how about reversing that? “So we don’t treat architecture as a product, or an artificial volume or space. It’s more like a landscape.”

MAD won a competition to design the buildings in 2006, which were initially dubbed “the Marylyn Monroe towers” by local residents in reference to their shapely bodies.

Apartments in both towers boast panoramic views of the city skyline from continuous balconies that wrap around the recessed glass facades. This set-back also helps to shade each apartment from direct sunlight in the summer months.

MAD also recently unveiled plans for a village of towering apartment blocks beside the Huangshan Mountains in China.

See more architecture by MAD, including a museum the firm completed last year in the desert city Ordos.

Above: site plan – click above for larger image

Photography is by Iwan Baan.

Above: typical floor plan – click above for larger image

Here’s a project description from MAD:

Absolute towers

We call our cities steel concrete forests.

Throughout the process of urbanization, skyscrapers have been symbols of technological bravado, prime capitals and the societal projections of wealth and prosperity. This limited framework for skyscrapers often results in solutions limited by homogenous, linear structures and degenerative duplication in business districts across the globe. Forced into an unnatural state of conformity, metropolitan life is negatively affected by these unchecked, efficiency-centric development practices. Without a challenge to the status quo, our cities will continue to lack the cohesion of life as implied by the term: forest. A forest is a thriving ecosystem wherein every organism survives only in a state of symbiosis. New ambitions nurtured in a changing global consciousness challenge the aging pattern of last century’s development and favor fresh thoughtful, inspiring and eloquent solutions for tomorrow’s high-rises.

What lies in the future of our cities? How should one grasp the concept of emerging high-density cities? How can city dwellers be immersed with an enriching experience of nature when its presence steadily diminishes in the face of the ever intensifying concrete inundation? Faced with these challenges, future high-rise buildings need to catalyze a higher level of complexity in our cities for the sake of harmonious civilization.

Fondly dubbed the Marylyn Monroe towers by local residents, the Absolute Towers parallel the twisting fluidity or natural lines found in life. This activation of flow forms an organic punctuation in the landscape and a desire for an urban acknowledgement of enthusiasm. Here, we thrive to challenge the sustenance of commonplace boxy skyscrapers. Our ambition was to provide each resident a unique experience of the city, a heterarchitical distribution. Continuous balconies widen individual viewing angles and promote community at the micro scale of a single floor. At the macro, the cadence of the floors rising into the sky echo the modular rhythms of the human experience, yet emphasizes the movement of an adoring figure. We hope this building can wake up metropolitans’ desires towards nature, such as sun and wind, and certainly, human bodies.

A Crisis of Identity

Like other suburbs in North America, Mississauga, near Toronto, has been quickly developing into an independent, urbanized area. Yet, the cityscape lacked a unique character. In response, we wanted to add something naturalistic, delicate and human in contrast to the backdrop of listless, boxy buildings. Sited at the junction of two main streets (Hurantario and Burnhamthorpe), the Absolute Towers gracefully bear their landmark status and act as a gateway to the city beyond. As a residential landmark that strives for more than simple efficiency, the buildings provide residents an emotional connection to their hometown and neighbors.

Eschewing the tradition of accentuated verticality in high-rises, the Absolute Towers choose not to emphasize vertical lines. Instead, the design features a smooth, unbroken balcony that wraps each floor of the building. In addition, at each successive level, the floor plate rotates in a range of one to eight degrees affording breathtaking panoramas of the Mississauga skyline concluding in reverence to the principle street intersection at its peak. By maximizing the viewing potentials inside and out, creating a wonderful medium for social interaction throughout the balconies, and connecting the city dwellers with naturalistic design principles, Mississauga is infused with a new character.

A New Sustainability

In place of the basic, functional logic of an aging modernism, the current trend of sustainable design is reminiscent of the sudden rise in the glass-faced boxy buildings of last century. Sustainability, in concept, is often unfortunately simplified to the lowest common denominator. If we limit the scope of sustainable ecology to energy savings, it will become merely a demand for comfort while the yearning of a return to nature is ignored. This design practice remains the axiom of the industrial revolution, man controls nature. We feel sustainability is a much greater concept which can guide a new culture of design resulting in real change. For instance, in traditional Chinese gardens, building and nature elements are integrated to create a spiritual and poetic environment fostering great literature, poem and music, or simply life and philosophy. Our approach, ergo, is to create a balanced environment that evokes the feeling of exploring nature while simultaneously a responsive model for the development of urban space in harmony with nature. A sustainable architecture in modern concept. Real sustainability results in a harmonious civilization.

This is the biggest challenge of our time. How do we rebuild urban environments with life and emotion where people are connected and respected?

An Economy of Structure

The torsional form of the towers is underpinned with a surprisingly simply and inexpensive structural solution. The two residential towers are supported by a grid of concrete load bearing walls. The bearing walls extend and contract in response to the sectional fluctuation created by the rotation of the floors while the balconies consist of cantilevered concrete slabs. In order to ensure the elegant edge profiles are as thin as possible, there is a thermal break in the slabs at the exterior glazing such that the insulation need not wrap the entirety of the balconies. Meanwhile, the dynamically fluid shaping of the towers, naturally aerodynamic, adeptly handles wind loading and ensures comfort throughout all the balconies. Besides providing every resident with a nice exterior place to enjoy views of Mississauga, the balconies naturally shade the interior from the summer sun while soaking in the winter sun, reducing air conditioning costs.

Location: Mississauga, Canada
Height: 170 meter
No. of floors: Tower A: 56 stories/170 m
Tower B: 50 stories/150 m

Building Area: 95.000 square meters
Tower A: 45,000 sqm
Tower B: 40.000 sqm
Site area: 4090 square meters
Primary Use: Residential

Client: Fernbrook / Cityzen
Design Architect: MAD architects
Director in Charge: Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun
Design Team: Shen Jun, Robert Groessinger, Florian Pucher, Yi Wenzhen, Hao Yi, Yao Mengyao, Zhao Fan, Liu Yuan, Zhao Wei, Li Kunjuan, Yu Kui, Max Lonnqvist, Eric Spencer

Associate Architects: BURKA Architects INC.
Structural Engineer: SIGMUND, SOUDACK & ASSOCIATES INC.
Mechanical Engineer: ECE Group
Electrical Engineer: ECE Group
Landscape Architect: NAK Design
Interior Designer: ESQAPE Design

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