Buildings designed by Ma Yansong blend into nature. The Beijing-based architect calls his philosophy "shan shui city", which translates as "mountain and water city". Read more: Grow your own hotel: this tropical high-rise in Singapore has its own ecosystem
MAD, his Beijing-, New York- and Los Angeles-based architecture firm, has put this thinking into practice in some of China's most exciting new buildings. But when Ma, 42, was asked in 2012 to design a 859-unit lakeside residential settlement among the Huangshan mountains in China's south-eastern Anhui province, even he baulked at the idea.
"It's almost criminal to build anything there because it's so beautiful," he says. MAD's original commission, from Hong Kong developer Wang Weixian, called for two imposing towers. Ma felt that was too intrusive for the Unesco-listed site, so he suggested a mountain village, made up of ten apartment blocks no taller than 60 metres in height. To make each building appear as natural as possible, he would give each floor – all 108 of them – a different shape, based on the geometry of the nearby mountain range."We made the apartments look like an extension of the existing landscape," Ma explains. "That is our solution to this conflict between human and nature."
There was just one problem: the apartments were designed for local residents, and individually shaped concrete floors would make them prohibitively expensive. So Ma used parametric software to find a workaround. "We analysed my freehand drawings and then redrew them with the computer. But when we redrew them we changed them a bit." Ma's 108 curves were reduced to five – which, when moulded in concrete, could be combined to make shapes that were unique, but affordable. "You want to repeat it so that you can bring down the cost, but you don't want people to realise," he says. To build the structure, he found an engineer from Shenzhen province, where buildings often sit on irregularly shaped hillsides.
MAD's Huangshan Mountain Village opens in April, after five years of construction and a cost of CNY487 (£57million). Its shortest building has five floors, and its tallest has 21. Ma is pleased with the final effect, which he says reflects the origins of shanshui in traditional Chinese culture. "If you look at traditional architecture, it had a very intimate relationship with nature. People can live in nature and they won't necessarily destroy it."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
