'The architect Ma Yansong (Beijing, 1975), one of the twenty "essential" architects according to the lists of the ICON magazine in 2008 and the first Chinese architect granted the RIBA Fellowship Award (2010), presents an exhibition project in Madrid produced by the ICO Museum, which tries to recover its path from the foundation of MAD Architects in 2004 until today.

'The tour around his work includes around 30 large and medium models, which will allow to understand the discourse of the architect who is considered to be among the most representative of the young generations that have studied in China, but have finished their studied outside the country, like him, who was student of the Architecture and Civil Engineering Institute of Beijing and then carried out a Master at the University of Yale. There he met Zaha Hadid, tutor of the course, and stayed another year in the USA to work with Peter Eisemann in the Holocaust Memorial of Berlin. It is the first exhibition carried out in Spain and despite having taken part in many group exhibitions, the only ones he had displayed until now in Europe are those of the Museo dalla Diocesi (Biennial of Venice, 2006) and in the DAC of Denmark in 2007, after their first spectacular anthological –'MAD under Construction'- carried out in the Tokyo Gallery of Beijing in 2006.

'Between 2000 and 2004, he took part in more than a hundred contests that somehow were useful for the profession and to reflect about projects, whose complexity made him rethink the relationship between art and architecture and the future of this discipline, understanding that architecture must have a sustainable social impact taking into account the local tradition and the need of a global urbanism. The production of spatiality generates relational dynamics that cannot be omitted and that are extended to the field of interactions between the location, habitat and subject that uses the spaces built from the social-spatial organisation of the city. The first contest he won and the first project he made were the Absolute Towers in Mississauga, begun in 2006 and whose presentation has taken place this year. The architect made a project for towers that seem to imitate the movement of a lathe and add new technology in order to reach the maximum functionality without stopping being sustainable. From the outside, they seem two large sculptures of 179.5m high and 45000m2 and 40.000m2 respectively, which meant the beginning of a professional career, inside and outside China, which hasn't stopped since then. Works such as the Fake Hills, Beijing 2050, the Harbin Cultural Island, the Taiping Vista Apartments or the Ordos Museum, among the more than thirty projects that are presented show an architecture that links the concept of landscape in painting and poetry, which has been transmitted in China from generation to generation from antiquity thanks to tradition and technology offered with his futuristic discourse.' (from Casa Asia)
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Onsite

practitioner
Location code
REF.MYS
Language

English, 

Spanish

Keyword
Publication/Creation date

2012

No of pages

379

ISBN / ISSN

9788415391364

No of copies

1

Content type

artist monograph

Chapter headings

Introduction by Fundación ICO/ Museo ICO

Introduction by Casa Asia

From (Global) Modernity to (Local) Tradition - Menene Gras BALAGUER

Towards a Landscape City - HUANG Du, 黃篤, MA Yansong, 馬岩松

Ma Yansong: From (Global) Modernity to (Local) Tradition
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Ma Yansong: From (Global) Modernity to (Local) Tradition, Ma Yansong: Entre la modernidad (global) y la tradición (local)