MAD Architects won “Architect of the year” with 34% of the votes.

September’s edition of a+u celebrates this journey though the theme “dreamscape”, with models, sketches, drawings, and images of MAD’s finest works. Among the twenty-two iconic art and architecture projects.

MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, has completed “Gardenhouse,” the first project completed by MAD in the USA.

Led by Ma Yansong, MAD Architects releases the design of the Wormhole Library, which sits on the coast in Haikou, Hainan Province in China. The sensuously curved pavilion appears to be a “wormhole” that transcends time and space. It serves as a multi-functional building that allows visitors to read, enjoy views of the sea, and attend open-air performances, temporarily removing themselves from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The building is now under construction and will be completed in 2021.

MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, was invited to participate in the long-awaited international competition to design the Aquatic Centre for the 2024 Paris Olympics. The firm teamed up with three French architectural studios, Jacques Rougerie Architecture, Atelier Phileas Architecture, and Apma Architecture on their design.

Set between the young vibrant city of Shenzhen, and the quiet oceanfront, “Shenzhen Bay Culture Park” juxtaposes two transcendental scales of time – the ‘ancient’ and the ‘future’ – through the setting of an ethereal artistic urban landscape. It is expected to be completed in 2023.

The first phase of the project, the stadium, is currently under construction and set to be completed in 2021. When it is done, the “Quzhou Sports Campus” will become the world’s largest earth shelter building complex.

Construction is beginning to take shape on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Four cranes tower tall above the Exposition Park site as work on the building’s steel framework begins to rise above the ground.

“This is a micro-utopian ideal. I hope that these bubbles will serve as vital newborn cells, giving the traditional hutong new life, and revitalizing the community.” – Ma Yansong

On September 24 and 26, 2019, Ma Yansong delivered keynot speeches in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan respectively at the “AICA Modern Architecture Symposium”.

Headquartered in Beijing, this will be the firm’s second office in China, and its fourth in the world.

MAD’s design demonstrates how the built environment can merge with nature through a new urban infrastructure, that while transforming the future of travel, also has the ability to reshape the way we plan and use public space.

Located in Paris’ 17th arrondissement, Clichy-Batignolles is a newly developing area of the city. ‘UNIC’ emerges as part of its mixed-use masterplan and actively enhances relationships within the community, representing the neighbourhood’s evolution.

MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, competed against four other global architecture firms, coming out ahead of Arata Isozaki & Associates, Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, GMP, and KDG, to secure the project.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris hosts a year-long exhibition of MAD Architects in France. ‘MAD X’ showcases ten of MAD’s most significant projects to date. “While ‘X’ represents the ten projects that are on show, it also has another meaning – ‘X’ also signifies the ‘unknown’,” says Ma Yansong, Founder and Principal Partner of MAD.

MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, releases its design for Terminal 3 of Harbin Taiping International Airport. Referencing the gentle slopes of China’s vast Northern plains, and the region’s immense snow and ice, MAD has conceived a terminal building that echoes the characteristics of Harbin’s geography and climate. Like a snowflake that has gently fallen onto the earth, it creates an architectural poetry that settles into its locale, while simultaneously expressing itself as a surreal, interstellar space of future air travel.

Unlike the pinnacles of conventional towers that typically express very distinct, imposing outlines, ‘East 34th’ expresses a deep-coloured glass curtain-wall façade that slowly fades into a slender and fluid transparent cap, quietly dissolving into the atmosphere.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris has acquired 12 architectural models that represent 10 of the most significant projects by MAD Architects. Each model uniquely exemplifies MAD’s architectural vision, and expresses the firm’s core values which look to envisioning a futuristic architecture that is akin to dream-like earthscapes – one that creates a conversation with nature, the earth, and the sky.

The scheme seeks to restore the spiritual harmony between humanity and nature through the integration of contemplative spaces that, while immersing inhabitants in nature, still meets the conveniences of modern day living.

The commissioning of this platform on top of the Fenix warehouse signifies the first public cultural building in Europe to be designed by a Chinese architecture firm.

MAD’s scheme inserts a new building onto the site of a traditional siheyuan courtyard that dates back to 1725. The design features a dynamic floating roof that surrounds the historic courtyard that, while preserving the cultural heritage of the site, forms a multi-layered urban narrative, where old and new co-exist.

MAD’s design embeds the functions of the sports park within natural forms, creating an earth-art landscape in the center of the city – a poetic scene that falls somewhere between that of Earth and Mars.

MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, presents its model for the “home of the future” on the occasion of the 2018 China House Vision Exhibition. “Living Garden”, conceived in partnership with Hanergy, breaks down the boundaries between interior and exterior, giving inhabitants the feeling that they are living in nature.