Building spaces for imagination

From desert to dream

His understanding of the relationship between people and their surroundings goes back to Beijing, where he was born and raised.

For Ma, the idea that nature and human life belong together is not an abstract architectural theory. He absorbed it from the city itself.

Beijing's traditional landscape, he says, never drew a hard line between the built environment and nature. Places such as Jingshan Park, Beihai Park and Shichahai showed him how gardens, water, architecture and human activity could exist within a single environment.

In traditional Chinese culture, he says, nature was not merely a backdrop to human life. It was part of it.

That experience has shaped his long-running interest in what he calls the "shanshui city", or "city of mountains and water" — a modern city informed by the traditional Chinese relationship between people and nature. The concept has become a core design philosophy of MAD Architects and is reflected in many of Ma's works.

"We don't lack modern buildings today," he says. "What we lack is the relationship between people and nature."

For Ma, the answer is not to reproduce old Chinese buildings or decorate modern architecture with traditional motifs.

He has little interest in simply placing traditional Chinese forms onto contemporary buildings.

"Liking tradition doesn't necessarily mean copying tradition," he says.

Instead, he wants to understand what lies beneath those forms — the philosophy, aesthetics and understanding of human life that produced them in the first place — and ask whether those ideas can generate something new.

"Tradition is something internal," he says. "To bring it into the present, you still need innovation."