For Ma Yansong, those who distrust beauty are looking at architecture in the wrong way

I am often asked for my thoughts on viral architecture, especially since some critics argue that these buildings, once transformed into images, end up pandering too much to the eye. My view is that we must not rush to dismiss them. This is not a matter of taste – many viral buildings that have been widely circulated are not necessarily lacking in taste. More importantly, it represents a bottom-up emergence of aesthetic diversity, making architecture more vibrant and connected to daily life, while pushing back against elitist aesthetic authority and even bullying.

It is also essential for the ideas and concepts behind architectural forms to be disseminated through various media. Today, this has even become part of the very essence of architecture. Architecture must possess not only materiality, functionality and spirituality, but also a broader capacity for communication. A beautiful building is created in a specific place, but it should not be an isolated island – it yearns to be shared. Only through dissemination can in-depth understanding and discussion take place, and valuable ideas can exert influence.

Indeed, very few people can visit and experience a particular building, and even fewer have the opportunity to live within a great work of architecture. Most people come to understand architecture’s meaning through texts, images and various media.

This includes architecture students and designers, who primarily study, research and discuss architectural cases through images, drawings and videos. Architectural drawings serve both analytical and expressive purposes – for example, the architectural diagrams of Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas – and they are also often regarded as art forms in their own right, such as the architectural drawings of Le Corbusier and Zaha Hadid. Expression is the destiny of creators.

Photography, painting and film that take architecture as their subject sometimes attract more attention than the buildings themselves, and excellent reinterpretations can even better convey a building’s materiality, spirituality, atmosphere and lived experience. When I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre was first unveiled, a single rendering sparked global amazement and controversy. Today, photographs of the building from the same angle are widely recognised and embraced worldwide.

The visual tension created by the superimposition of old and new architectural images – along with the cultural influence it has brought to the city and the era – is the true significance of this architectural work. Of course, low-quality creations and their dissemination can lead to misinterpretation, controversy and criticism. Yet compared with the conservative, characterless, monotonous face of a thousand cities, or even the mediocrity of the simply, unapologetically ugly, I find such controversies, striking as they may seem, actually negligible in number.

Are buildings that are deliberately beautified through imagery truly harmful? Perhaps. But because online dissemination, AI and beautifying filters have long become commonplace, people’s eyes have evolved the ability to see through filters, to seek truth and to imagine. In fact, the very existence of filters illustrates the gap between reality and the ideal. An architecture of images still operates on the level of images; it cannot fundamentally alter the physical world. An image is an extension of physical space, not an end in itself.

There is also a ridiculous phenomenon: physically attractive people are easily dismissed as mere ornaments, needing to spend far more time than others to prove or demonstrate their depth and substance – sometimes even failing to do so at all. This dualistic prejudice is widespread: beautiful architecture must ignore function, and distinctive architecture must disregard context. Such logic is both laughable and arrogant, as if ugliness were something to be proud of.

Those who disparage visual beauty do so because they reduce it to meaningless ornamentation. In truth, beauty itself is energy, vitality and a sense of order. It brings pleasure and healing and thus embodies both the functional and spiritual dimensions of architecture.

Opening image: Martin Maurer, Big Duck, 1931, Flanders, United States. Photo Gerald Zaffuts from Adobe Stock