Massive, Curvaceous Buildings Designed to Imitate a Mountain Forest
At its best, our built environment reflects what’s already naturally there. Architects have long drawn inspiration from nature, but rarely is it as literal as MAD Architects’ plans for Chaoyang Park Plaza in Beijing.
A couple years back, the Chinese firm, led by architect Ma Yansong, proposed a plan for revitalizing Beijing’s central business district. The 120,000 square meter plaza, which just broke ground, would sit on the southern edge of Chaoyang Park, one of Beijing’s largest swaths of green space. This left MAD in a unique position to address one of Beijing’s biggest architectural questions: How do you realize the city’s desire to be modern while respecting its abundant natural beauty?
MAD’s answer was to build a series of buildings that didn’t just respect the land, but reflected it. Based on traditional Chinese landscape paintings, the plan shows two curvaceous, asymmetrical towers that jut up into the sky like the surrounding hills and mountains. Ridges and valleys of shiny glass look as though they were the product of years of water erosion, and have the added functionality of creating a natural ventilation system by drawing a breeze into the buildings.
The ultimate harmony between the manmade and natural is something MAD has been exploring for more than a decade.
A courtyard lobby connects the two towers and forms a mountain valley, while the top of the towers will features multi-level terraces with public gardens. Across the plaza, four smooth, round office buildings are meant to look like river stones. Their shiny, glazed exteriors each have little individual quirks, in the same way you’d never find two stones that look exactly alike.
It’s a lot of metal and glass, but despite all that, MAD’s aim is to make walking around Chaoyang Park Plaza feel similar to wandering around a mountainous forest. The ultimate harmony between the manmade and natural is something MAD has been exploring for more than a decade.
You can see this same idea in the firm’s proposal for Shanshui City, an elaborate urban development idea for Guiyang, China that would span hundreds of thousands square miles. The concept of Shanshui City (which is the combination of the Chinese words for mountains and water) dates back to the 1980s when famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen first proposed the idea of “Shanshui City.” The scientist had a vision for a new type of urban development that would be harmony with the Shanshui spirit; a city that was at home with the water, mountains around it.
It’s not about being sustainable just for the sake of sustainability then. MAD’s plans are almost like architectural feng shui, orienting the built environment in a way that it softens the inevitable realization that much of what use to be nature is now hunks of metal and glass. But hopefully, hunks of metal and glass with a sense of history and a little soul.