Ma Yansong: A Conversation with Nature

Ma Yansong, founding partner of MAD Architects, has made his US debut with the launch residential development Gardenhouse in Beverly Hills, designed as a ‘hillside village’ and intended to connect humans with nature and one another

‘Today, we’re building spaces, not spiritual environments. That’s the real challenge for architecture: can we create buildings, cities or urban spaces that are spiritual and can connect with people?’ asks architect Ma Yansong. ‘The coronavirus crisis is related to population density in cities. We challenge nature too much; we should learn to fit into nature instead,’ he says. ‘Also, I don’t think we should design cities to try to divide people or make social distancing permanent. We still need to encourage people to gather, share and communicate.’ Raised in Beijing, Ma was influenced by traditional Chinese culture, which views humans as part of nature. Bringing his cultural background to his practice, he’s now applying it to a Western context.

Together with his team at MAD Architects, Ma has done just that with Gardenhouse in California’s Beverly Hills, the firm’s first completed project in the United States. The residential project takes the form of a ‘hillside village’ in an urban setting, intended to impart a strong sense of community in a city where most construction lack spirit or humanity. A physical manifestation of his Shanshui City design philosophy, Gardenhouse fosters harmony between humans, nature and the built urban environment.

Located along Wilshire Boulevard, the 4,460-square-metre, five-storey mixed-use scheme comprises 18 spacious residences —studios, condominiums, townhouses and villas — that sit above ground-floor commercial space. A cluster of ‘houses’ with pitched roofs and floor-to-ceiling windows appears to be growing out of the over-600-square-metre green wall, echoing the single-family houses with perfectly manicured lawns and the hills of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. Demonstrating Gardenhouse’s exclusive character in a city that cherishes privacy, every apartment has its own independent entry/exit circulation route and offers the space and privacy of a free-standing home. At the same time, each unit features its own private outdoor area that faces the open-air inner courtyard on the second-floor, which has been installed with a dense canopy of trees and native plantings, thereby extending the interior outside and encouraging residents to interact with nature and one another. ‘The concept was to make this building look like a small village, to break down the scale,’ Ma explains. ‘We made all the common areas, like living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms, face the courtyard, so the inhabitants could go outside on the terraces and talk to each other for a cosy community feeling. It’s like a Beijing courtyard house.’

Gardenhouse differs from Ma’s previous work in that it’s deeply rooted in its location rather than offering Beverly Hills an architectural icon like the highly-anticipated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, for which the architect was hand-picked by George Lucas himself. Currently under construction, the museum will resemble a cloud floating above the city in Ma’s signature style of ethereal, sculptural and futuristic buildings. ‘Before Frank Gehry designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles had never had a building like that, so I feel that Los Angeles’s architectural culture is almost like “If something doesn’t belong here, then it belongs here”,’ he says. ‘I think the cultural context is more important than the neighbouring buildings.’ Less preoccupied with dialoguing with a city’s buildings or the immediate surroundings and more concerned with how his creations connect to the general landscape of the region — its hills, valleys and oceans, and on a larger scale, in terms of time and space — his emotion-evoking, soul-stirring, monumental masterpieces in China look like something from a classical Chinese landscape painting, with its mountains, lakes and forests.

‘Given the current social distancing and restrictions we’re all facing, I began thinking about the boundary for freedom,’ he says. ‘Modern architecture is about how to manage the city and make it functional. It lacks freedom, so my architecture tries to challenge that. I want to makse it freer, more open and change the rigid order.’

Text / Nina Starr