Global as a matter of course
Xian, China — QINGYUN MA’s eyes dart left and right as he sits in a Buick van hurtling west on National Highway No. 310.
The road swerves through China’s dusty northwest plateau, passing honeycombs of cave dwellings and adobe homes on cliffs. Large arch bridges cross Wei River. Terraced fields, carved in hues of yellow, brown and green, climb up to the skies.
“It’s so beautiful, amazing,” Ma says. “This is better than any architecture. The peasants are the architects....
“If this sets up right, I’m thinking of setting up a USC studio here. I want to continue the university program in a place where culture, landscape, modernity and hands-on construction meet.”
Ma, the new dean of USC’s School of Architecture, was born and raised here in Xian, China’s ancient capital and eastern terminus of the Old Silk Road, home of Tang Dynasty tombs and the famed terra cotta soldiers. But on this late December afternoon, Ma, wearing fashionable knee-high boots and safari jacket, was on a road trip west of the city to explore stones and natural materials that could be used for a public bathhouse that he’s helping build in a remote apple-farming village near Gansu Province.
The bathhouse is pro bono work for Ma and his Shanghai-based firm, MADA s.p.a.m., but it epitomizes his approach to the profession. The 10,000-square-foot facility will employ green technology -- solar panels and treated water -- and meet a basic health need for farmers while giving village women a communal center where they can chat and drink tea.
“The bathhouse is meant to be a new cathedral,” he says, walking along a gulley in the village.
Ma, 41, is the first foreign national to head USC’s architecture school. He began this month, filling a post that had been vacant since the last dean, Robert H. Timme, died in October 2005.
University officials said they wanted the school to become more global, and few seemed surprised that they picked a Western-trained star from China, given Los Angeles’ links to the Pacific Rim and the Asian country’s spectacular rise in the world, not to mention the nation’s building craze that has lured architects from all over. UCLA recently tapped 44-year-old Hitoshi Abe from Japan to take over as chair of its department of architecture this spring.
“It’s a smart shift,” says Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, noting that American architecture programs “are shamefully focused on the West.”
Koolhaas first met Ma in 1995 when Ma was working as an architect in New York for Kohn Pedersen Fox. He asked Ma to help him on a study of southern China’s boom, which later became the book “Great Leap Forward,” and has since sought his advice for other projects, including the tubular China Central Television headquarters in Beijing.
Ma has “a very genuine and profound understanding of China, not only classical but contemporary and also Communist,” says Koolhaas, who nowadays comes to Beijing once a month for business. “I think he will reinterpret existing traditions of the school through the lens of a different culture.”
Indeed, while a visiting instructor at Columbia University last fall, Ma worked with his class to turn an abandoned cement factory in southeast China into a boutique hotel. He wants to extend such programs at USC. Ma talks about sending students to Shanghai to investigate smart living as well as teaming them with counterparts in South America, Europe and the United States. An affable man with rectangular black glasses and a patch of hair under his chin, Ma could easily be mistaken for a student and is clearly comfortable in an academic setting though he plans to continue to design in the U.S. and China while serving as dean. He has lectured at Harvard, Penn and several top architecture programs in Europe.
“Schools have their own boundaries, but students should not,” he says.
In China, Ma and his firm have built a reputation for designing distinctive modern buildings, with all of the West’s technical and material sophistication, while preserving Chinese traditions.
One example is the public library in Qingpu, about 45 minutes southwest of Shanghai. The building, located on an islet in a man-made lake, looks like two floating ribbons that undulate with the contours of the water. Ma says the form and shape of the Thumb Island project recall a set of rocks in a typical Chinese landscape composition.
He designed the library to be used as a leisure garden. Bamboo, brush and rocks surround the grounds. People can walk from one bank of the lake onto the roof of the building, which is covered with stone roadways, wooden stairs and grass.
On a recent afternoon, migrant workers were lying on the slope of the curved roof bathing under the sun. “Oh, this is great,” Ma says. “This is exactly what I hoped people would do.”
Zheng Shiling, professor of architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai, likens Ma to the former Boston Symphony music director Seiji Ozawa, who has spoken about his Japanese sensibility in interpreting Western music.
“Ma designs contemporary architecture with Chinese spirit,” says Zheng.
Yet Ma hasn’t had an easy time of it in China.
It isn’t for a lack of work. China’s total construction activity exceeded 2 billion square meters last year -- the equivalent of about 10,000 Empire State Buildings. While this massive building spree has fostered a lot of creative energy, there has also been a tendency to cut corners and strive for flash, with little regard for quality.
A few years ago, Ma won a competition for a hotel project in Changsha, a city near Mao Tse-tung’s hometown in Hunan Province. His design was a slender V-shaped glass facade towering 325 feet, but he says he never had a chance to finish the technical details and material selections. “The client and the local architect threw me out of the game,” Ma says. “It’s a general problem practicing in China.”
Ma learned a tough lesson from that experience. “Talent is never enough,” he says. “The design is a political and social act.”
His firm’s completed projects include a university library and popular commercial square in the port city of Ningbo, an apartment complex in Shanghai with balconies shaped in alternating patterns that give it a jazzy look and a stone house on a mountain in Xian that Ma built for his father.
A wall, but not a barrier
NOT far from that house is Ma’s Jade Valley vineyard, producing Pinot Noir varieties, and not that far from there is perhaps Ma’s most ambitious work: Xian’s Centennial TV and Radio Center. The ancient city, though a tourist magnet, has never been one to push modernity too far. The city center remains enclosed by a 8.5-mile perimeter wall, a skin that Ma says has suffocated its development. Even so, the new television center hardly looks like a part of China’s lost history or the Communist Party’s highly guarded propaganda machine. Instead, the large modernist building, north of the Wild Goose Pagoda, tilts upward in a staggering pattern, its black, flamed-stone surface blending with the dusty and hazy environment and the color of the city’s wall.
“To create meaningful buildings, you have to be sensitive and attentive to social and landscape problems rather than the building itself,” says Ma, gesturing with contorted hands as he speaks.
Ma campaigned hard to secure official approval for the design, even opening a branch office in Xian. MADA also has operations in Beijing and at its headquarters in central Shanghai, where a team of 40 architects and staff, many of them young and foreign-trained, work out of a former kindergarten building whose facade, floors and staircase have been remade with bamboo.
“If you look at his work, Ma likes to spend a lot of time exploring local materials and experimenting with how to use them,” says Delphine Yip, a Shanghai architect who worked on the Xintiandi retail and entertainment complex in Shanghai. “Through these new interventions or ways of putting bricks together, it looks very modern but also local and fits into the context.”
Ma’s sensory talents were nurtured early. His parents worked as government tailors. Ma was born a year before the Cultural Revolution began, but he doesn’t have horrible memories of that decadelong period. Instead he speaks fondly of after-school lessons in painting and drawing. During junior high school, Ma says, his uncle told him that the life of an artist wasn’t intellectual or scientific enough. On that day, the young Ma made up his mind to become an architect.
He entered Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he was influenced by Tan Wang, a pre-revolutionary architecture theoretician who had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Arizona. “He said to me, ‘Doing architecture is to cultivate your personality. Your building is yourself,’ ” Ma says. “That to me as a college student was quite a shock. I always thought architecture was a kind of aesthetic judgment or skill of design. But he basically said that’s all very trivial. You must be a good, solid person to be a good, solid practitioner.”
Not long after graduating, Ma followed his then girlfriend to the U.S., where he earned a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Then came several years of working and, as he put it, hiding in New York’s dense urban landscape. Ma’s wife, Shouning Li, is also an architect. The couple have two young boys.
Ma’s American experience broadened his thinking about the practice of architecture -- the process is more democratic in the U.S., he says -- and emboldened him to be more creative.
“American education has cultivated strengths in your own reasoning process. If you come up with a hypothetical and you develop your own operation rationale, and the end product can fulfill that line of reasoning, then it’s judged to be good,” Ma says. “In China, the judgment is oftentimes poetic, literature and all those intuitive things rather than rational processes.”
Ma says he tries hard not to hew to any architecture style. “There’s no style, but there’s a principle. In practice, it has to be programmatically intelligent.... Function is always the most reliable source of inspiration.”
Another guiding credo for Ma: Don’t stick around any one place for too long, lest you develop a routine and everything looks and feels normal. That’s one reason Ma says he’s left China for the second time. Every five or six years he has packed his bags and moved on.
Ma had never lived in a Western U.S. city before, though he vividly remembers peering down at Los Angeles from a plane ride and marveling at its sprawl.
“L.A. is about spreading ... the search for the perfect home,” he says. Ma will soon build his in Pasadena, on a piece of sloping land overlooking the Rose Bowl.
