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" It's very strange: if you're a philosopher or musician or an artist, people automatically believe you can see the future. Even if they don't like you, they accept your vision as an individual. "

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" 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. "

Ma Yansong

Culture

Practice

Art

" The way we do our architecture is to show that we can come up with our own solutions. We don't just take orders. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I actually feel like a very traditional architect. "

Ma Yansong

Traditional

Feel

" When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn't get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead. "

" When I was young and used to look at Chinese architecture, there was no clear definition between what was landscaping and what was architecture. "

" I treat my projects as art. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The world itself is already a great textbook. "

" Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape. "

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

" I don't like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don't appear any different from those in the past. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" People can live in nature, and they won't necessarily destroy it. "

" 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. "

Ma Yansong

Life

Nature

" When we talk about a city, we need to talk about what the future is. Whats the ideal scenario in the future? "

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

" The shan-shui city idea is trying to bring traditional values and ways of living to modern high-rise architecture. "

" 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 be brave and tell the politicians what a better future could be. "

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

" Architects like to work in a problematic environment. "

" Architects think that beauty is a crime. "

" 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. "