BEIJING— The architect Ma Yansong is reweaving the urban fabric, one building at a time. After receiving his Master’s of Architecture from Yale in 2002 and working as a project designer with Zaha Hadid in London, Ma returned to his hometown of Beijing to found MAD Architecture Studio with Yosuke Hayano in 2004. Since then, Ma and his colleagues have quickly established MAD as one of the most forward-thinking studios in Beijing, creating striking landmark buildings in China and abroad that draw from local culture to re-imagine the relationship between the natural and built environments.

Shortly after the announcement that MAD’s Hutong Bubble 32 — a shimmering silver pod perched on a rooftop in one of Beijing’s old neighborhoods — was shortlisted for the 2010 Brit Insurance Design Awards’ Design of the Year in the architecture category, I visited MAD’s buzzing offices, where I spoke with Ma about Beijing’s courtyard houses, his vision of new Asian architecture, and his upcoming collaborative exhibition with artist Olafur Eliasson.

Tell me MAD’s creation story. How did the studio begin? How has the team evolved?

I always wanted to have my own office. After graduating in the United States and working in London, I came back to Beijing and I asked my former colleague in London to join me, a Japanese architect named Yosuke Hayano. We were talking about the new vision for Asian architecture. We worked together here for three years, and then we started a small office in Tokyo. Now he’s in charge of the office in Japan. Another partner, Dang Qun, I knew when I was in the States. After two years of working in Beijing, Yosuke and I were submitting designs to lot of competitions, but when finally we started to do something real, we realized that we didn’t know how to build a building, so I asked Dang Qun to join us. She had already been in the States for more than ten years working on projects. Recently a new partner, Jiang Ping, joined us. After five years we already had around 10 building projects of different scales. I know construction and design, but we needed really someone who could control things. We often talk about architectural concepts and architecture’s role in society — all these abstract ideas — but of course people focus on how your building turns out. Jiang Ping worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago for almost 10 years, so he has a lot of experience in high-profile projects. He brings more practical experience to the office.

What’s your working process when you approach a new project?

At the beginning it’s very emotional. We meet with a lot of potential clients, but we only work with people we like. You can tell from the first meeting with a person whether or not you want to work with them. Then we go to the site to get a feeling about the project. Once we know the social and physical contexts, ideas will come up naturally and quickly. This process is very quick — maybe only one meeting and one trip, and we already have a strong sense of what we want to do. If you don’t have a feeling about the people involved and the site, it’s tough to respond.

Earlier, you mentioned the notion of “new Asian architecture” that you and Hosuke wanted to explore when you started the studio. At that time, what kinds of things were you thinking about that were specific to this context? Now that you have more experience working in the region, how have those ideas shifted?

At the beginning, we were only thinking that we needed something to bring us together. He’s Japanese, and I’m Chinese, and we wanted to find something in common, which is Asia. Now we are interested in the question of the relationship between humans and nature in this context. I think this is an issue with a unique tradition in Asia, and it can carry us into the future. We are making a lot of large projects now, because of China’s urban development, where you have so many big buildings and high-density cities. But when we look at the history here, there are a lot of small houses and gardens in Japan and China, and people here appreciate mixing architecture and nature. At lot of poetry from China and Japan was inspired by nature, and human feelings are very much associated with the environment. We are now exploring the role of nature in a high-density urban context. We’re building a vertical city, but it’s not machine-like, sculptural architecture; you can have high-density metropolitan life and, at that same time, still live with nature. That’s something that we have always talked about together.