Ma Yansong and the Idea of the Shanshui City
Born in Beijing in 1975 and trained at Yale, Ma Yansong founded MAD Architects in 2004. His Harbin Opera House and his idea of the shanshui city explain why his buildings look like landscapes.
Ma Yansong was born in Beijing in 1975. He studied at the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture and took a master’s degree in architecture at Yale, and in 2004 founded MAD Architects.
Buildings
His best-known early work is Absolute Towers in Mississauga, Ontario (2006-12), which received the CTBUH award for the best tall building in the Americas in 2012 and the Emporis award for the best skyscraper that year. In China he built the Ordos Museum (2005-11), the Harbin Opera House (2008-15) and the Chaoyang Park mixed-use scheme in Beijing (2013-16), and he is the architect of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. We report the Harbin building in Harbin Opera House Opens.
Shanshui city
His philosophy is called shanshui city. The original idea of combining the city with the traditional Chinese landscape of mountains and water was proposed by Qian Xuesen in the 1980s. Ma’s version treats shanshui both as a landscape and as a person’s emotional response to the surroundings, and seeks to unite urban density and function with the artistic idea of natural landscape, with human feeling at the centre.
He received the RIBA International Fellowship in 2011 and was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2014.