{"id":94494,"date":"2026-09-24T00:45:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T06:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=94494"},"modified":"2026-09-24T00:45:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T06:45:59","slug":"the-lucas-museums-architect-wants-to-help-you-escape-from-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/the-lucas-museums-architect-wants-to-help-you-escape-from-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lucas Museum\u2019s architect wants to help you escape from reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At a preview this month for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, its lead architect, Ma Yansong, flashing a faint, wry smile, led a phalanx of some 20 reporters around the building. Only about four or five could hear him. Some journalists circled the group, angling to get closer. Many just gave up and watched the tour as sort of an abstract performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma doesn\u2019t say much; and when he does it\u2019s in phrases that often trail away. Images have always been his most forceful language. And the exuberant visions he now produces, in three dimensions, have helped him become one of the world\u2019s most prominent architects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma is the founder of the Beijing-based firm MAD Architects. Now 50, he leads a team that has completed major cultural and residential projects in 16 countries and counting. Their signature is hard-to-believe designs that do all of the shouting \u2014 etched towers churning like hula-hooping women; a museum honed like an ancient stone; an opera house resembling a mountain, bursting from the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Lucas Museum, which opened Tuesday, they\u2019ve crafted a curvaceous, $1 billion-plus landmark covered in swirling greenery that appears to levitate over Exposition Park, forming a bridge over a shaded plaza and then tapering down into a rolling landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAD\u2019s otherworldly buildings enliven and soften their surroundings. But Ma\u2019s target is larger: the modern city itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCity planning is all about function, order, technology,\u201d he told me, sitting in the conference room of MAD\u2019s Santa Monica office, just a few blocks from the beach. \u201cWhere is the emotion?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inventing Worlds<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By weaving nature, futuristic design and feeling into the urban core, Ma hopes to help overturn expectations for cities where boxes, grids and barriers are the norm. The heart of MAD\u2019s approach is freedom: Freedom of movement, freedom from the humdrum, and freedom from rigid expectations of what should surround us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople need to mentally escape from reality,\u201d Ma said. \u201cArchitecture can help.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Ma, escape has been an art form since he was a child, the son of two engineers in one of Beijing\u2019s traditional hutongs \u2014 the dense alleyways packed with residential courtyards \u2014 near the Forbidden City. His family occupied a small room, built a kitchen along their courtyard and used a public toilet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His first route out of reality was on paper. Each month he waited for Chinese magazines like Young Science and We Love Science, with their exuberant rockets and satellites rendered in atmospheric watercolors, and for comic books like \u201cAstro Boy\u201d and \u201cStar Wars.\u201d They showed him that images blurring fantasy and reality could make people believe another world was possible. A budding artist, he scribbled his own imaginary worlds: futuristic buildings and cities, strange animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His next goal was to become a filmmaker \u2014 what better way to transport people than the big screen? \u2014 but a professor at the Beijing Film Academy saw his drawings and suggested architecture, a profession booming as China furiously remade itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, which was, as Ma put it, \u201cnot so systematic about education,\u201d gave him room to tinker and teach himself. The school\u2019s well-stocked library introduced him to Frank Gehry and other architects who treated buildings as far more than practical vessels. \u201cI saw architecture could be art,\u201d Ma said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He decided to broaden his mind, and his prospects, in America. \u201cI wanted to see that crazy architecture in the magazines,\u201d he said. Scholarships carried him first to the University of Arizona, then to Yale. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Robert A.M. Stern taught him that architecture could go in any direction \u2014 not the one line he was shown in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He interned briefly for both Eisenman and Stern. But it was Hadid\u2019s work, with its untethered beauty and experimental digital forms that felt to him like natural forces in motion: \u201cA big wave through the site,\u201d Ma described it. \u201cSomething growing out of the place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduating in 2002, Ma spent about a year at Hadid\u2019s London office, where he met a Japanese architect, Yosuke Hayano, who had studied at London\u2019s avant-garde Architectural Association. Both were soon sent to Beijing, working for Hadid by day and entering competitions by night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They admired her practice but chafed at the dominance of foreign architects in China\u2019s building frenzy, when almost anything modern was assumed to be \u201cWestern.\u201d They wanted the future of China to be built from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon joined by Dang Qun, a Chinese architect educated at Iowa State University, whom Ma met through an email forum, they formed MAD in 2004. Ma, who remains the firm\u2019s leader and public face, often imagines and sketches a project\u2019s core concept. Yosuke brings logic, attention to detail and technical judgment. Dang coordinates MAD\u2019s global teams, consultants, clients and construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma adopted Hadid\u2019s fluid, algorithmically fueled approach, but bent it in a gentler direction. Where Hadid\u2019s work, like the architect herself, was forceful, imposing its will on its site, Ma would defer to it \u2014 more a friendly alien than a conquering one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jianfei Zhu, professor of East Asian Architecture at Newcastle University in England, sees a \u201cprecious lightness\u201d to Ma\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His hand-sketched spaces, translated into digital form, also allowed for intuitive and human unpredictability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re doing art, not engineering,\u201d Ma said. \u201cThere\u2019s some method, some logic, but there\u2019s also something unexpected \u2026strange.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was another development humming through MAD\u2019s work: Ma\u2019s architecture was inspired by natural forms, but he was most interested in capturing the feelings that nature created in people \u2014 how sitting under a tree canopy, or gazing at a wide horizon could induce a state of calm, or how looking down from a bluff could spark a sense of thrill and discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Breakthrough<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAD developed competition entries for two years, without success. Then in 2006 came a breakthrough: It won an international competition with a design for the 56-story residential Absolute Tower in Mississauga, Ontario, near Toronto. The design, edged with rippling balconies, shifted its floor plan slightly on every level, making the building seem to twist curvaceously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was quickly nicknamed the Marilyn Monroe tower and sold out, prompting the developer to commission a second tower. And it became, in China, a geopolitical event: A young Beijing firm had won a major project in the West while Western architects were dominating China\u2019s building boom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The victory gave the firm the cachet to win more work, at home and abroad. Around the same time, MAD was commissioned to design the Ordos Museum in Kangbashi, a new city in the semiarid grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The design, a tawny, aluminum-wrapped boulder concealing luminous interior caverns and some 40,000 objects of regional and cultural history, floated atop a striated, pale stone terrace. It captured the seductive, distant quality of Ma\u2019s early work, a polished landmark evoking nature but not quite fused with it. Ma, too, cultivated what one friend called his \u201cmeta-mystery vibe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As MAD\u2019s workload grew, it became known for concocting mesmerizing forms. Global architecture \u2014 nowhere more so than in China \u2014 was testing the limits of modern materials and new digital tools. The firm\u2019s Harbin Opera House in northern China appeared to be shaped by wind and water, with a sinuous white aluminum skin. At Beijing\u2019s Chaoyang Park Plaza, black glass towers, sculpted as peaks and valleys, were connected by a glass atrium that evoked a waterfall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some critics called MAD\u2019s approach superficial, exalting monumental images that were oblivious to their sites or culture. In 2017, The Guardian\u2019s critic Oliver Wainwright called Ma China\u2019s \u201chomegrown conjurer of sinuous, globular forms\u201d with a \u201cpenchant for blobs.\u201d Others regarded the buildings as expensive selfie backgrounds, or disembodied objects hiding their engineering behind smooth facades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some Chinese designers initially distrusted the work because it didn\u2019t look \u201cparticularly Chinese,\u201d Zhu, the professor, said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma, who considers his architecture neither strictly Chinese nor strictly global, doesn\u2019t deny the importance of form and illusion in his fantastical work. But he adds that its disconnect with \u201ccontext\u201d is precisely his point \u2014 a critique of the way modern cities have lost touch with nature and feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cShanshui City,\u201d MAD\u2019s manifesto introduced in 2013, Ma found an ancient Eastern context for his futuristic work: Chinese mountain-and-water inkwash paintings, known as \u201cshanshui,\u201d where buildings and terrain merged. Even the hutongs that Ma despised in his youth, which were threaded among trees, lakes and historic buildings, provided inspiration for the idea of nature and habitation harmonizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Evolution<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after \u201cShanshui City\u201d was introduced, Ma received an invitation from the master creator of engulfing worlds, George Lucas, to compete for his new art museum then being considered for the Chicago waterfront. Lucas had been inspired by MAD\u2019s Ordos Museum, which touched down in a strange world \u201clike a spaceship in the desert,\u201d he told Ma. (The architect, in turn, remembers Ordos being vaguely inspired by the Naboo Royal Starship from \u201cStar Wars.\u201d) MAD won the competition but the project got bogged down in legal battles for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma\u2019s subsequent plan for Lucas\u2019s museum in Los Angeles helped set the stage for his firm\u2019s evolution from singular objects to experiential topographies \u2014 \u201cShanshui\u201d writ large.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The museum\u2019s roof is planted with alpine grasses and shrubs, woven with curved pathways. Its galleries, though fairly conventional, are edged with wide glass lookouts and a 90-foot-wide oculus, transporting the eye to the sky and city. Its podium sprouts trees and gardens, then pours down into an 11-acre park by Studio-MLA over the museum\u2019s underground parking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around the world, his projects have been \u201cswallowed\u201d by nature, he said. (Ma calls this \u201cmaking architecture weaker and weaker\u201d so that landscape and human experience can become stronger.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Quzhou Sports Park in eastern China\u2019s Zheijiang Province, stadiums rise like volcanic craters from rolling greenery. At Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, buildings nestle in an artificial terrain and their roofs become public parks. In a courtyard kindergarten in Beijing, a colorful, undulating rooftop playground weaves around mature trees and historic courtyards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma, now gray around the temples, has changed, too. He seems more at ease, quicker to smile and laugh. Like his newer work, he\u2019s less aloof, more approachable. \u201cHe\u2019s still ambitious, but I think he has achieved enough of a level of success to feel more comfortable in his skin,\u201d said Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation and curator of the exhibition, \u201cMa Yansong: Architecture and Emotion,\u201d at Rotterdam\u2019s Nieuwe Instituut in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma said his focus is on creating experience rather than spectacle. \u201cI think I\u2019m more clear about what people need. It\u2019s not only about me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With more than 30 projects ongoing, Ma constantly jets around the world from his base in Beijing, where he and his wife, Qiushi Yu, are raising their daughter. His second home is Los Angeles, where his two sons went to high school. Ma now stays at Airbnb\u2019s here after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 fires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma\u2019s latest ambition is to extend his approach, merging architecture with landscape across neighborhoods and even cities. MAD\u2019s Baiziwan social housing project in Beijing contains 4,000 apartments with six enclaves linked by a \u201cfloating garden.\u201d He\u2019s now designing an entire district outside Shanghai with towers, malls, multilevel landscapes, and walking areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s safe to assume the Shanghai project won\u2019t look or act like the world we know, thanks to what Chen calls Ma\u2019s \u201cdeeply ingrained rebellious streak.\u201d But what makes Ma\u2019s work resonate at any scale, Chen said, is its ability to tap into an exuberant vision based in feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s trying to reconnect people and societies to things that have been lost in our relentless search for progress,\u201d Chen added. \u201cWe thought we could rationalize everything. Look where it\u2019s gotten us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n