It’s a MAD World

The latter is an example of MAD’s tendency to now move beyond the local Chinese context, and design impressive buildings in faraway lands. Case in point: MAD has taken on the challenge of designing part of The World: that famously exorbitant reclaimed island cluster off the shores of Dubai. The firm’s design-in-progress for the 20,358sqm ‘Tokyo Island’ is inspired by the beauty of a many-lobed coral, spreading its arms into the surrounding environment. And just as the outer form of coral is primarily an ostentatious host to the minute organisms within, MAD’s Tokyo Island will eventually become an outlandish residential ocean resort for the Dubai jet set community, bordered by coastal pathways along man-made tropical beaches. It is a far cry from The Absolute Towers (2006), under construction in Mississauga, Canada. This city, like many in China, is a rapidly growing hub, at the crossroads of a calm, humble past and a buzzing commercial future. And so the two twisting, almost humanoid residential towers – located physically at the intersection of two main roads – acknowledge this change, and stand as a guardian gateway for the living people of the city, not just its physical presence. A continuous, sinuous balcony wraps around the building, masking the often intimidating vertical lines of the skyscraper, and giving the residents 360- degree access to nature, sunlight and wind. While truly responsive to the Canadian context, it is an ideal that would not be out of place in a Chinese project.

While the studio’s principals hail from divergent backgrounds – having been born, educated, exhibited, accredited and acclaimed across the world – the point of convergence is the sincere ‘Chineseness’ of their current collaboration. Ma Yansong, the Beijing-born ‘local’ of the three principals, took his Masters of Architecture at Yale, worked with Zaha Hadid in London, and with Eisenman Architects in New York, before founding MAD in 2004. Dang Qun hails from Shanghai, gaining her Masters at Iowa State University, before teaching at the university’s Foreign Studies Program in Rome. And Yosuke Hayano, though Japanese born and bred, and educated in Tokyo (a Bachelor of Materials Engineering from Waseda University and Associate degree in Architecture from Waseda Art and Architecture School), took his Masters in London, and has been exhibited as far afield as Orléans, France and Graz, Austria. But in the end MAD is a Beijing design studio, and at its heart, one finds an undying dedication to the social, structural and stylistic concerns of modern-day China.

Harmony between the built and natural environments is something of an ideal in architecture: an ideal that many aim for (and often miss). An aspiration for those with two green thumbs and an ecoconscious ethos, as much as those who adore the built form and wish for it to be perfectly embraced by and framed in its surroundings. So a project that intentionally rejects the ideal, and instead aims to dispute its urban context is something of a curiosity. A conundrum. Unless, of course, the setting is China, where unfortunate urban planning is, for better or worse, quite prevalent, and the desire to draw attention away from it often perfectly understandable. Driven by unprecedented economic success, the Erdos Municipal Council decided to build a new city centre in the middle of the Gobi Desert, dozens of kilometres from the current city. Erdos Museum is the jewel in the architectural crown of this new urban locale, yet it is also a reaction to the symbolic but empty urban masterplan itself. The museum is described as a “bright, tranquil and fluid environment”, imbued with an organic sensibility completely at odds with that of the new city. In this sense, Erdos Museum acts as a focus ring, setting the depth of field to a point beyond the undesirable urban surrounds, focussing instead on the barren beauty of the Gobi Desert.

The museum takes on a natural, irregular cellular form: its inner nucleus wrapped in a skin of polished metal louvres, which allow natural ventilation, but also reflect and fragment the buildings surroundings, turning an otherwise bland landscape into something animated and expressive. Inside, a highly-glossed continuous curvilinear wall reflects sunlight captured by the glazed roof, bringing light to the centre of the space. The continuous wall also sets the format for several exhibition halls, all of which open to the shared public space running through the length of the museum.

The structural effect of a repeated motif reappears in MAD’s Sinosteel International Plaza, a pair of towers in the Binhai Economic District in Tianjin – a 358-metre office tower, and a 88-metre hotel, commissioned by China’s nationalised steel giant, Sinosteel, as a distinctive, Chinese symbol for the city. Like Erdos, Binhai Economic District is – or will be – a purpose-built boomtown: the third Special Economic Zone in China, after Shenzhen in the 80s and Shanghai’s Pudong District in the 90s. And like the museum at Erdos, MAD’s design aims to distract from the utilitarian surroundings using pattern and texture. At Erdos, this theme is set by polished metal louvres: the motif for Sinosteel International Plaza is a honeycomb façade, created by endlessly tessellating hexagonal windows. The hexagonal ‘cells’ come in an assortment of five different sizes, spread irregularly across the façade to give the impression of a naturally-occurring pattern. Already this sets the building apart from the past few decades of ordered, strict Chinese architecture, and while the hexagon is a strong element in traditional Chinese art, the seemingly haphazard arrangement is far from conventional. And yet, the honeycomb skin is not as random as it seems, for the placement of different sized cells is actually determined by the natural movement of sun and wind, minimising heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer. As practical as it is artistic, the external honeycomb structure also provides all the structural strength for the towers, freeing up the internal spaces for much more flexible use. Isolated from the bland city by their location atop a green hill podium, these two towers are visually, energetically and practically enlivened: a counterpoint to the flat, fixed edifices of the new city.

The population of mainland China is already well above 1.3 billion – and counting – which means that most major developments are residential. And with ground space at a premium, it also means that most residential developments take the form of high-rise skyscrapers. Again determined to subvert the norm, MAD has literally turned things around (and shifted perspective) with Fake Hills: a volume that spreads out wide instead of rising up high, forming a slab shape that references the hills dominating the local landscape. And yet to encourage light, air, extensive views and a non-intrusive presence – ambitions that crop up more and more in MAD’s projects – the volume is punctured through with voids. Consequently, the ‘fake hills’ seem less like an impenetrable landform, and more like a sinuous sea serpent rising out of the Beihai coast. Either way, Beihai Fake Hills – like the Erdos, Sinosteel, Tokyo Island and Absolute Towers projects – will be a revolutionary landmark: one that breaks away from the urban monotony, reinventing the character of its urban locale.

If MAD has anything to do with it, China would have a brand new urban character: one defined by daring architecture – truly Chinese, and yet truly revolutionary. And to see what MAD has in mind for this new urban China, one need only look so far as the design house’s Beijing 2050 proposal, an urban research project that envisions a Beijing more than 40 years from now, bigger, better, and more beautiful than ever. The proposal suggests a reinvention of each of Beijing’s major districts. The Future of The Hutongs – the historically poor neighbourhoods – will involve new private facilities and amenities, interwoven with historical buildings. A Floating Island would settle over the Central Buisness District, featuring interlinked digital studios, restaurants and government functions to accommodate the economic trends of tomorrow: “connectivity and interdependence”. And Tiananmen Square – fraught with a recent history of political and military tension – would become ‘The People’s Park’, a forest of trees and lush grass, with the national theatre and cultural facilities relocated underground in a soft landscaped mountain, connecting invisibly into the transport network. MAD’s vision for the future of Beijing isn’t so mad after all: it is a vision that sees Beijing as a city with a green heart – a city that is the green heart of a brave new China. +

1 Representing what the architects see as the connectivity and interdependency of tomorrow's economy, MAD’s Beijing 2050 proposal consciously rejects the imitation of western downtowns, and seeks to define a distinctly 21st century mode of urbanization: post-western, post-industrial floating islands which connect businesses and government facilities horizontally rather than isolating them in tall glass boxes. 2 Even the interior typology of the Erdos Museum is an unambiguous rejection of what the architects see as the city’s uninspiring urban planning. 3 and 4 The museum takes on a natural, irregular cellular form: its inner nucleus wrapped in a skin of polished metal louvres, which allow natural ventilation, but also reflect and fragment the building’s surroundings, turning an otherwise bland landscape into something animated and expressive. 5 to 7 The Binhai Economic District in Tianjin is to be the third Special Economic Zone in China. The façade of the new Sinosteel International Plaza within the distrcit uses the traditional Chinese motif of a hexagon, but tessellated in a seemingly arbitrary pattern and in a variety of sizes to break with its more conventional surroundings. 8 and 9 Rather than being sited to frame views of Beihai's surrounding hills, MAD's ‘Fake Hills’ are the man-made view themselves. The Fake Hills are the architects’ response to the monotony of residential development, and attempts to create affordable high density housing that is yet architecturally original.

IMAGES courtesy and copyright of MAD