[ad_1]
The exhibition, “Ma Yansong: Landscape in Motion,” on view at the Hong Kong Design Institute Gallery (HKDI) until April 7, is an overview of almost Ma Yansong’s entire career.
He started his own practice two years after completing architecture studies at Yale University, during which time he worked for prominent architects Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid.
For two decades, his studio became known for buildings that undulate like mountains, flow like water, and evoke the natural elements of the earth.
‘Full of adventure’: Inside China’s award-winning campus
‘Full of adventure’: Inside China’s award-winning campus
Ma, who has offices in Beijing, Los Angeles and Rome, is arguably China’s most famous global architect, with works ranging in scale from single pieces of furniture to vast master plans.
HKDI’s exhibition, adapted from a major 2023 exhibition at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in Shenzhen, southern China, provides a behind-the-scenes look at several of the projects.
“We have shown a lot [objects] – models, sketches, structures – explaining the ideas and thinking behind the process,” Ma said. “We start with the research of each location and explain this to visitors. It’s like a narrative.”
No doubt some visitors will recognize the project that initially captured MAD’s global attention: Absolute Towers in Mississauga, Canada, just outside of Toronto.
In 2004, Jack Ma won an international competition to design 50- and 56-story apartment towers. The graceful curves of these apartment buildings, which twist 206 degrees from bottom to top, were quickly nicknamed the “Marilyn Monroe” towers by local media.
Ma remains surprised that he was given such an opportunity so early in his career.
“It’s a strange thing,” he said. “It was an open competition and I was a young designer and I started with a critique of the city as a whole. I didn’t want to design a boxy, solid tower. I wanted to make it more natural. .I didn’t expect it to be built.”
It went according to plan – when the Twin Towers were completed in 2012, Ma became one of the world’s newest “starchitects.” But even before Absolute Tower topped out, Jack Ma was busy working on some high-profile projects in China.
Completed in 2011 in Inner Mongolia, northern China, the Ordos Museum is a spherical metal structure that sits like a boulder on the desert landscape. The first phase of the rockery was completed in 2016 in the city of Beihai in China’s southwestern Guangxi region and mimicked a mountain range.
Located in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, the Harbin Grand Theater was completed in 2015 and is reminiscent of the winding waterways of nearby wetlands.
These projects clearly draw inspiration from natural forms, which Ma continues to explore in his most recent projects. Located in Haikou, Hainan Island, southern China, the Yunjing Public Library, opening in 2022, uses concrete to create smooth, amorphous spaces.
“I want to dematerialize my space,” Ma said. “I used a lot of white, a lot of smooth surfaces so that people wouldn’t be too attracted to the material. Of course, I used glass because I needed light, I needed transparency. Yes, concrete, because I like fluidity.
“But in most buildings, I don’t use a lot of textures or finishes. It’s more about the experience of space, using light, scale, shape to create those experiences.”
He pointed to some recent buildings as examples of this approach. One River North is an apartment building in Denver, USA, to be completed in late 2023. It is a glass box with 10-story “landscape cracks” running through it like a vertical canyon.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, currently under construction in Los Angeles, combines the smooth concrete forms of cloudscapes with a landscaped exterior in an attempt to transform the entire building into a park.
Two other projects take the marriage of nature and built form to an extreme.
Shenzhen’s Shenzhen Bay Cultural Park, currently under construction and expected to open in 2025, will consist of a set of structures that look like rounded river rocks stacked on top of each other, but most of the structures will be located beneath a landscaped roof deck in an attempt to blend into the surrounding landscape.
“Basically, I wanted to remove all modern elements and make the architecture and space more abstract,” Ma said. “When people walk in, they feel a bit lost and have to magnify their sense of time and space to find references.”
How 3D printing can help revitalize a century-old village in rural China
How 3D printing can help revitalize a century-old village in rural China
The 70-hectare Quzhou Sports Park in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province takes a similar approach, hiding its buildings beneath what Jack Ma calls a “green volcano” landscape.
The park’s centerpiece, a stadium with views of the nearby mountains, will be completed in 2022. The rest of the park is still under construction and is expected to be the largest earth-covered structure in the world when completed in 2025.
“It can move up and down so people can walk along the shape of the building,” Ma said. “They can reach the top of a mountain and stay there to talk to the universe.”
At the same time, MAD is also committed to projects that respond to the built environment, not just the natural environment.
The Phoenix Immigration Museum, scheduled to open in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 2025, adds a gleaming chrome spiral staircase structure to a historic waterfront warehouse built in 1923.
Yuecheng Siheyuan Kindergarten will be completed in Beijing in 2023 and has a traditional kindergarten siheyuan A courtyard with an ambiguous structure whose roof is a huge playground.
“When I look back on this exhibition, [the projects] So diverse,” Ma said. “It’s not a typical architectural style. I guess I’m still finding my path – I’m not set in stone yet. Although it’s been 20 years of practice, I think we’re still challenging. We’re still young.”
“Ma Yansong: Landscape in Motion” is on display at d-mart, Hong Kong Design Institute, Tseung Kwan O, until April 7.
[ad_2]
Source link