Who is Ma Yansong of MAD, the new guest editor of Domus 2026

“We exist at the intersection of nature and urban life” is the slogan with which MAD presents itself online, and indeed it captures the distinctive character of an office that, in its first twenty years of practice, has dealt with everything from experimental installations to theoretical discourse, culminating in the manifesto Shanshui City, a text offering an interpretive key for anyone seeking to understand the sinuous forms with which Ma Yansong is reshaping landscapes not only across China but far beyond. Ma Yansong was born in Beijing in 1975, one year before the death of Mao. His education unfolded during a moment of profound structural transformation in a China rapidly shifting its economic model and embracing openness to foreign powers as a way to graft market mechanisms capable of sustaining growth. In this sense, his Master’s degree from Yale University and his earlier Bachelor’s from the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, institutions to which he would later add teaching positions at Tsinghua and the University of Southern California, capture the timing and dual soul that permeate his work: a rediscovery of Chinese tradition through the art of classical landscape, and its adventurous reinvention. “Growing up in Beijing, I was influenced by the ancient part of the city and by the mountains and lakes. I imagine a future that does not disavow memories from the past”, he says in an interview with Domus Editorial Director Walter Mariotti.

Peter Cook about Ma Yansong

In August 2001, while interning in Peter Eisenman’s studio, he visited one of the Twin Towers, a month before witnessing their collapse and beginning the first significant project on record: Floating Island, Ma’s proposal for the reconstruction of Ground Zero. His speculative project stemmed from the dream of a cloud as a possible new floating city, a place to live safely, protected from the collapses that the pursuit of verticality inevitably entails. After graduating, he spent about a year in London at Zaha Hadid’s studio before returning to Beijing, where he founded MAD in 2004.

Despite clear continuity in certain formal poetics, MAD’s work can be divided into two phases: before and after 2015, the year Ma explicitly articulated the principles guiding the design philosophy behind the firm’s buildings. In the decade prior, the young office immediately positioned itself on the international stage. Within just two years, MAD was exhibited at the 2006 Venice Biennale with Beijing 2050, a concept for rethinking the capital’s rapid urban development through micro-scale interventions in the hutongs, an alternative to conventional tabula-rasa redevelopment. Hutong Bubble 32 and 218 would be built in 2009 and 2019 respectively. In the same period, MAD presented the Absolute Towers during the competition aimed at redefining the skyline of Mississauga (Domus 891, April 2006). Nicknamed the Marilyn Towers, they were completed in 2012 and made a striking impact on contemporary debate by challenging the inherent repetitiveness of skyscraper form, introducing subtle variations without significantly altering the plan (Domus 963, November 2012).

The 2011 Ordos Museum, an object which, like Rem Koolhaas’ Casa da Musica, seems to have dropped from the sky into the city, marks an intermediate stage in Ma’s exploration of curvature. Compared to the Marilyn Towers, new three-dimensional variations appear, seemingly anticipating the definitive break with Euclidean geometry that would fully emerge in Harbin. Completed in 2015, the Harbin Opera House is one of MAD’s most iconic works. Set within wetlands, the architecture becomes an abstraction of its natural environment. Like an artificial terrain compressed, folded, and crafted by wind and water, the volume seeks integration with the site’s topography. This project signals the gradual conclusion of a period dedicated to exploring the limits of architectural form and opens a new phase in which Ma turns his attention to morphologies found in nature.

The moment when Ma Yansong decided to equip himself with an explicit design philosophy, simultaneously a processual tool and a narrative device, marks a turning point in his career. Shanshui City is not just a book published in 2015; it is Ma Yansong’s manifesto or, for the more cynical, a theoretical attempt to anchor MAD’s curved architecture to the tradition of classical landscape painting. Its starting point is the rejection of thinking about the built environment in terms of rectangles, a condition that for Ma represents the pragmatism of a sociocultural system that has sacrificed its soul, identified with tradition, on the altar of economic and functional efficiency.

Ma Yansong

Ma’s answer lies in a strong association between soul and form, rooted in the evocative power of symbols and their ability to pacify “restless” spirits. Shanshui literally means “mountains-and-waters”, though in traditional Chinese thought it is far more complex, influenced by folklore, geomancy, and animism. The Shanshui City distills the philosophical concepts embedded in classical Chinese landscape, incorporates themes from garden architecture, which often emulates miniature landscapes, bringing them to an urban scale, hides infrastructure beneath artificial terrain or behind green coverings, and designs soft forms that imitate plants and animals. Its ambition is to produce human-scale spaces, places where people can measure themselves against controlled dimensions, mitigating the disorientation or alienation that sometimes emerges in spaces shaped by technocratic processes or purely speculative logic.

Human scale is a constant in Ma’s projects, as identified by critic Li Xiangning when describing the Jiaxing Train Station, the first railway station designed by MAD, completed in 2024. The project tackles infrastructure, heritage, and public life with originality, redefining a possible new canon for mobility architecture in China (Domus 1090, May 2024). The Shanshui City concept finds its most direct application in the Huangshan Mountain Village, a complex where buildings reproduce the undulating profiles and vertical pinnacles of an invented mountain range (Domus 1027, September 2018), and in the dark towers of Beijing’s Chaoyang Park Plaza (2017). Meanwhile, the office returned to the theme of hutongs, this time not with reflective micro-structures but with a large-scale project that overturns the canonical way of inhabiting Beijing’s traditional courtyard fabric. In the Yucheng Kindergarten (Domus, February 2021), a project that creates intergenerational spaces thanks to the inclusion of facilities for the elderly, children can experience the hutongs from the level of their rooftops, emphasizing new relationships between earth and sky, interior and exterior, building and city. 

Bjarke Ingels about Ma Yansong 

Also in 2021, MAD completed its first social housing project, Baiziwan, where the rethinking of typology is achieved through creative prefabrication, aerial connections, and careful landscaping. As in Jiaxing, the common thread is the theme of connection, both immaterial, in the redefinition of urban landscapes, and physical, through pedestrian links that soften the rigid block typologies typical of Chinese urbanism.

The period after the Shanshui manifesto sees projects more literally tied to landscape forms and biomorphic volumes: the roofscape of the ZGC International Innovation Center in Beijing (Domus 1094, October 2024), the land-art architecture of Quzhou Sports Park, an edifice emerging from the ground’s undulations, the Fenix Museum in Rotterdam (2025), and the shells of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, expected to be completed in 2026 and set to become MAD’s first building in the United States, one of the most anticipated global projects.

Some critics have interpreted the Shanshui concept as an attempt to legitimize MAD’s gestural exuberance through philosophical tradition without noticing the deeper levels of Ma’s interpretation. Rather than reproducing natural elements, the formalism of MAD’s architecture aims to exemplify processes and symbolic allusions that evoke emotional attunement with the environment humans inhabit, ultimately not so different from the intentions behind historical Chinese gardens. "Before I became an architect, I wanted to be a movie director. I have always been attracted to imaginary and visionary stories. The conceptual aspect and the vision are key, in my case, even more important than construction," he concludes. 

Luca Molinari, Domus 1026, July 2018

Among the many awards and recognitions he has received, Ma Yansong stands out for his inclusion in the lists of Time’s 100 most creative people in business and the 100 most influential people of 2025. In 2023, the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning hosted a retrospective titled Landscapes in Motion, revealing the office’s ongoing exploration of forms that integrate nature and the urban realm. In 2025, Ma Yansong: Architecture and Emotion opened at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. In addition to the monographs MAD Works: MAD Architects (2016) and MAD Rhapsody (2021), Ma has curated major exhibitions worldwide, including China’s participation in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Co-exist. He has often been cited as one of the most influential architects of his time, inspiring countless people who have lived, if only briefly or occasionally, within his fantastical spaces.

Together with Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano, Ma Yansong leads MAD from its offices in Beijing, Rome, and Los Angeles, carrying forward a discourse on architecture that is recognizable in its forms yet far from exhausted in its exploration of the possible relationships between humans, cities, and nature.

Opening image: Credits Li Yingwu. Archivio Domus ©Editoriale Domus S.p.A.