MAD's Chaoyang Park Plaza in the eye of Iwan Baan

These images, showing a different perspective of MAD's new Beijing skyscraper complex, was taken by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan capture these new mountainous skyscraper.

Chaoyang Park Plaza in Beijing by MAD Architects. Photograph © Iwan Baan

Chaoyang Park Plaza, 10 rounded structures of 220,000 sqm, were completed by MAD earlier this year. Baan paid attention on contrast and his photographs are juxtaposed with a skyline dominated by repetitive blocks.

"Iwan Baan visited Beijing in early August, when the summer heat and humid climate left a heaviness in the air – one that could be seen and felt. Over the course of the days he was scheduled to shoot Chaoyang Park Plaza, he was dealt less than ideal photographic conditions. But, this is real Beijing, and it offered Iwan Baan the opportunity to photograph MAD's latest project in its truest environment."

With the grey atmosphere looming, Iwan Baan was able to capture our project in a way that evokes a different mood. In his images, Chaoyang Park Plaza, even with its soft, organic lines, and poetic silhouette, offer a very strong visual contrast to its surrounding urban setting.

We want to blur the boundary between nature and the artificial, and make it so that both are designed with the other in mind. Then, the argument in the modern logic of humans to protect or to destroy nature will no longer exist if we understand and see humans and nature as co-existing. Human behavior and emotion is part of nature, and nature is where that originates and ends," said MAD's founder Ma Yansong.

Read less

View more images

Metalocus recommends

Como Terraces by Carr. Photograph by Tom Ross

Balance composition of volumes on the riverbank. Como Terraces by Carr

Guaecá House by Estúdio Rossi. Photograph by André Scarpa

From forest to sea. Guaecá House by Estúdio Rossi

Nogal House by Escobedo Soliz. Photography by Ariadna Polo

Container and content. Nogal House by Escobedo Soliz

More information

Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano. MAD

mad is a Beijing-based architecture design office dedicated to creating innovative projects. Founded by Ma Yansong in 2004, MAD Architects is led by Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, and Yosuke Hayano. It is committed to developing futuristic, organic, technologically advanced designs that embody a contemporary interpretation of the Eastern affinity for nature. With a vision for the city of the future based on the spiritual and emotional needs of residents, MAD endeavours to create a balance between humanity, the city, and the environment.

MAD's projects encompass urban planning, urban complexes, municipal buildings, museums, theatres, concert halls, and housing, as well as art and design. Their projects are located in China, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. In 2006, MAD won the design competition for the Absolute Towers in Mississauga, Canada. Through this, MAD became the first Chinese architecture firm to build a significant high-rise project abroad. In 2014, MAD was selected as the principal designer for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, USA, becoming the first China-based architecture firm to design an overseas cultural landmark. MAD’s signature cultural projects include Ordos Museum (2011, China), Harbin Opera House (2015, China), Tunnel of Light (2018, Japan), China Philharmonic Concert Hall (under construction), Yiwu Grand Theater (under construction), FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam (under construction), Cloudscape of Haikou (2021, China), and Shenzhen Bay Culture Square (under construction). Other urban projects include the Clover House kindergarten (2015, Japan), Chaoyang Park Plaza (2017, China), China Entrepreneur Forum Conference Centre (2021, China), Jiaxing Train Station (under construction), Quzhou Sports Campus (under construction), and Nanjing Zendai Himalayas Center (under construction), among others.

While practising architecture, MAD documents and discusses its reflections on architecture, culture, and arts through publications, architectural exhibitions, as well as academic lectures and presentations. MAD’s publications include Mad Dinner, Bright City, MA YANSONG: From (Global) Modernity to (Local) Tradition, Shanshui City, and MAD X. MAD has organized and participated in several contemporary art and design exhibitions, including MAD X, a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2019; Shanshui City, at UCCA in 2014; Feelings are Facts, a spatial experience exhibition with artist Ólafur Eliasson at UCCA in 2010; and MAD in China, a solo exhibition at the Danish Architectural Center, Copenhagen in 2007. MAD has participated in significant exhibitions at several iterations of the Venice Architecture Biennale and Milan Design Week. MAD has also participated in exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and MAXXI (Rome). An array of MAD’s architecture models have been acquired by the Centre Pompidou and M+ Museum (Hong Kong) as part of their permanent collections.

MAD has offices in Beijing (China), Jiaxing (China), Los Angeles (USA), and Rome (Italy).

Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano and Qun Dand.

MA YANSONG

Ma Yansong is a Beijing-born architect (1975) recognized as an important voice in a new generation of architects. He graduated from the Beijing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Ma attended Yale University after receiving the American Institute of Architects Scholarship for Advanced Architecture Research in 2001 and holds a master's degree in Architecture from Yale.

He shares his knowledge as an adjunct professor at the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Tsinghua University, and the University of Southern California. Ma Yansong's journey is a continuous narrative unfolding, exploring innovation and pushing the boundaries of what we perceive as the built environment.

Since the founding of MAD in 2004, his works in architecture and art have been widely published and exhibited. Ma Yansong was awarded the 2006 Architecture League Young Architects Award. In 2008 he was selected as one of the twenty most influential Young Architects today by ICON magazine and Fast Company named him one of the ten most creative people in architecture in 2009. In 2010 he became the first architect from China to receive a RIBA fellowship.

“I work with emotion and with the context. When I design a building, I close my eyes and feel as if I saw a virtual world which lays half way between the city, the nature and the land. It goes from large scale to small scale. Many things travel in front of my eyes; I feel them and try to find the way to express my feelings. The language I use is the least important of it all. It does not matter whether they are straight lines, curves... I only intend for people to feel the same or to find something unexpected” says Ma Yansong. “MAD 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”, he states.

Photograph by Daniel J.Allen

Iwan Baan

Iwan Baan is known is a dutch photographer primarily for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. Born in 1975, he grew up outside Amsterdam, studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and worked in publishing and documentary photography in New York and Europe.

After his studies in photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, Iwan Baan followed his interest in documentary photography, before narrowing his focus to record the various ways in which individuals, communities and societies create, and interact within their built environment.

With his combined passion for documentary and space, he’s photographs reveal our innate ability to re-appropriate our available objects and materials, in order to find a place we can call our own. Examples of this can be seen in his work on informal communities where vernacular architecture and placemaking serve as examples of human ingenuity, such as his images of the Torre David in Caracas – a series that won Baan the Golden Lion for Best Installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

With no formal training in architecture, his perspective mirrors the questions and perspectives of the everyday individuals who give meaning and context to the architecture and spaces that surround us, and this artistic approach has given matters of architecture an approachable and accessible voice.

As the inaugural recipient of the Julius Shulman award for photography, today, architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Toyo Ito, SANAA and Morphosis turn to Baan to give their work a sense of place and narrative within their environments. Alongside his architecture commissions, he has collaborated on several successful book projects such as Insular Insight: Where Art and Architecture Conspire with Nature, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities and Brasilia & Chandigarh – Living With Modernity. Baan’s work also appears on the pages of architecture, design and lifestyle publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Architectural Record, Domus, Abitare and Architectural Digest.

Iwan Baan was named one of the 100 most influential people in contemporary architecture world by the magazine Il Magazine dell’Architettura on occasion of their 100th issue. He is recipient of the AIA Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award.

Published on: December 11, 2017

Cite: "MAD's Chaoyang Park Plaza in the eye of Iwan Baan" METALOCUS. Accessed

<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/mads-chaoyang-park-plaza-eye-iwan-baan> ISSN 1139-6415