Top 45 Ma Yansong Quotes

In China, we had some buildings that looked like the White House or wine bottles. All they seemed to represent was bad taste.

Architects think that beauty is a crime.

I would say that many architects are very logical. They start their process from analysis and from rational processes to try and find the ‘right’ answer, like solving a mathematic equation.

In our traditional culture, people have a very different view towards nature than in Western culture. We consider humans as part of nature. But in the West, they talk about protecting nature. That’s a joke because nature doesn’t care; it’s humans who need to protect themselves.

We need to enter a new era to make nature and humans more emotionally connected in modern cities.

I think architecture should be a stage, not something too material – more of an environment, not a product.

To allow millions of people to live together on limited land, we have to go to the sky; we have to build a high rise. But we can still build nature and social space into the towers. Each family can have their own courtyard in the sky.

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they’re isolated from people.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

We proposed Tiananmen Square – this very empty political square in the city centre – should turn green. Maybe in the future, this space could become a very human and open urban space. And if that happens, I think that all the cities around China will follow to change.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

A lot of ancient poetry sees in nature a reflection of human emotions, and in a post-industrialized era, once people have become more aware of the necessity of a more harmonious relation between man and nature, we need to build cities which can connect with human spiritual needs instead of being merely functional.

In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That’s what today’s architecture community should be.

If we’re talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we tend to use technology to show our power: you know, we build high-rises, towers, big buildings that become symbols of power and capitalism. We don’t talk about how emotions and nature can be connected.

I don’t use tools to create things, but I use them to realize things.

The world itself is already a great textbook.

In China, it’s very easy to make architecture special because anything you design will look different, as most parts of the city are very similar. They make so many massive residential buildings.

I grew up in Beijing, and there weren’t many modern buildings during my childhood. I was influenced by traditional culture – the courtyards, the hutongs, the old city, and all the art forms – so, very naturally, I brought this to my practice.

My first impression of Beverly Hills was that it had a landscape of small houses built by famous architects, so I didn’t want to make a big block or sculpture here; I wanted to make a community rooted to the place.

We need to be brave and tell the politicians what a better future could be.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.

Chinese people need to be aware of their present and ask, ‘What’s our culture? What can we bring to the world?’ I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

When you look at classical structures, they’re often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it’s not something standard that you can copy.

Architects like to work in a problematic environment.

Historically, sci-fi movies have played an important role in inspiring young people.

Traditionally, in the Eastern World, man and nature are close: men find happiness and prosperity in the beauty of nature, even if the nature is actually built to match this very need.

In a traditional Japanese or Chinese garden, it’s not only about the building or temple but about the whole setup – the structure, the landscape, the light, the plants, the water. The whole experience that makes your life there so beautiful.

There must be a way to combine the high rise and high-density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky.

A shan-shui city is a modern city, a high-density urban situation, but we pay more attention to the environment. We bring waterfalls; we bring in a lot of trees and gardens. We treat architecture as a landscape.

In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning – not only as a landscape but a part of daily life.

The architecture scene in China is the most open and free climate compared to many other places. You can find many opportunities.

China has some cities, traditional cities, with a long history. They are so beautiful, and they were planned so smartly. I call them gardens on the city scale. For example, Beijing has mountains, waters, lakes, bridges, towers. It was a very poetic city.

Instead of making grand structures and beautiful buildings, we should focus on the environment and the urban space and how you encourage people to live.

What if we treat the high-rise like a mountain, or we have gardens in the sky, or waterfalls? I think that’s the most challenging thing I want to try in my architecture.

We need architects to be visionaries.

I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.

People love to go closer to nature and other people, so we need to create environments that let people have these emotional connections.

I have never been to Mars. What will we discover when we get there? A red landscape, quiet horizon, frozen glaciers? Probably all is as beautiful, in its own way, as the Earth was thousands of years ago.

The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.

Sometimes I sketch and then scan my sketch directly to make the curves more freehand. I don’t want to make perfect industrial curves.

I’m trying to create architecture as landscape. But I’m not copying nature.

‘Shan shui’ you can literally translate as ‘mountain and water.’ In traditional Chinese culture, there are a lot of paintings about shan shui, but now we’re talking about a shan-shui city.

I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden – the Forbidden City – and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial.