Ma Yansong: “our work is an attitude, a posture towards architecture, towards society. Through our work we want people to be inspired by a place through local nature, time and space”
The exhibition at the Museo ICO Museum for the first time brings together a selection Ma Yansong’s works in a way that expresses his ambition to make architecture inspired by Chinese landscape painting and poetry. The exhibition is a showcase of alternatives to an urban life with organic, humanistic spaces at a time that creates increasing urban similarity around the world.
According to Menene Gras of Casa Asia “Ma Yansong has been able to take the contemporary architecture to a new dimension with the design of singular and unique buildings, product of a formalist and sculptural architecture, in line with the international architecture of the last decade, as attractive to the eye as comfortable for users.”
An architecture that reconsiders the relation between art and architecture, and upon the future of this discipline, understanding that architecture must exercise social impact taking into account local tradition and the reality of a global urbanism”, explains the exhibition’s commissioner; and she adds, “The production of spatial feelings generates for him some relational dynamics which can’t be omitted and which spread into the scope of interactions between localization, habitat and the subject who occupies those spaces built on the city’s socio-spatial organization”.
Among the projects shown in the exhibition is the City & Art Museum in Ordos, a museum for a new-town in Inner Mongolia created for a population that only a few generations ago exerted their culture as nomads. As well as Ma Yansong’s international breakthrough, the award winning ‘Absolute Towers’, two curvious towers located in a fast urbanising suburb of Toronto. A commission he landed by winning an international competition by both public and professional vote. With this exhibition the museo ICO returns to incorporate architecture to its programme as one of its fundamental pillars to show relevant national and international discourse on the topic of making space. Along the exhibition a fully illustrated catalogue has been published by Actar and will be available worldwide.
Venue: Museo ICO, C/ Zorrilla, 3. Madrid.
Dates: October 31 2012 until March 3, 2013
