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In an old low-slung neighborhood not far from the center of Beijing, I turn down a winding alleyway just wide enough to accommodate a single lane of traffic. It is here, on the third floor of a building surrounded by stall-size shops and courtyard houses, that I find mad, one of the country’s premier architecture studios. It seems at first an incongruous location for a firm known for creating landmark futuristic high-rises unlike anything else in China: twisting, organic forms that appear at times to be made of quicksilver, their interiors evoking the sets of Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. I later realize, however, that it is perfectly suited to the studio’s vision of urban Asia, in which the oldest and the newest architectural expressions are not antagonistic but harmoniously integrated.

Passing through a glass door at the top of the stairs, I am transported away from the city’s dust and noise into a monastic suite of pristine, light-filled rectangles whose cloistered atmosphere is enhanced by the remarkably quiet hum of the two dozen or so people working side by side at the long pale tables in the open-plan office. The back wall is covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; elsewhere, pinups show a building’s progression from concept to near completion. Striking sculptural models dot the rooms — a white, curving tower of stacked disks here, a silver, jagged, star-shaped construction there. The maquettes refer both to MAD’s architectural projects and to its artwork — more speculative, philosophical inquiries into urbanism that have been presented in solo shows and at such events as the Venice Architecture Biennale. Today the hum is about a collaborative project MAD is working on with the artist Olafur Eliasson: an exhibition involving architectural interventions and multisensory installations that will run at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art through June 20.

Another project, Hutong Bubble 32, was recently short-listed for the London Design Museum’s 2010 Brit Insurance Designs award in architecture. Referring to the narrow lanes (hutongs), like that outside MAD’s headquarters, which are common in Beijing’s oldest districts, Hutong Bubble 32 is actually one of the three parts of the firm’s Beijing 2050 proposal for reconceiving the city’s architecture and urban planning through a series of fanciful interventions. The project’s silvery, amoebalike bubbles are flexible structures that can fulfill different functions within Beijing’s crumbling neighborhoods, thus allowing residents to remain in situ. One such bubble has been realized on the rooftop terrace of a renovated courtyard house. At a time in China’s rapid development when architecture seems limited only by its creators’ imaginative capacities, even MAD’s most far-fetched proposals yield practical applications and raise imperative questions about urban life.

At the office a documentary filmmaker from Copenhagen researching the studio asks if she can shoot my conversation with MAD’s founding principal and resident visionary, Ma Yansong. Ma, who was born in 1975 and grew up in a Beijing courtyard house, established the studio here in 2004 after completing his master’s in architecture at Yale and working as a project designer with Zaha Hadid in London. He speaks in a soft, rapid patter that is punctuated by occasional laughter as he explains how he tapped a former Hadid colleague, the Japanese architect Yosuke Hayano, to help him set the firm up. Hayano now runs the Tokyo office; their partnership remains one of the axes around which the business revolves. Since its opening, MAD has taken on additional staff and two more principals: Qun Dang and, last year, Ping Jiang, both of whom, like Ma, were educated abroad and have considerable practical experience in designing and realizing large-scale projects.

Such experience is necessary since MAD currently has no less than eight major buildings under construction and another three in various stages of development. Among the most extraordinary of these is Urban Forest, a 1,250-foot-high mixed-use tower in the southern city of Chongqing designed as a stack of irregularly curving forms with lushly planted balconies ("sky gardens") on each floor. The structure, according to the project proposal, "represents the most challenging dream of the contemporary Chinese architecture: a type of urban landmark that rises from the affection for nature." Urban Forest also embodies MAD’s notion of green architecture, emphasizing, Ma explains, "not only technology but also the human spirit."

Context plays a key role in the studio’s designs. "In our research," Ma tells me, "we discovered that the soul of Beijing is the courtyard." For the Huangdu Art Center, a gallery and hotel planned for central Beijing, MAD built up a series of rectangular spaces with central enclosures, one per floor, transforming the single-story Beijing courtyard house into a vertical design more suitable to a space-starved city of more than 17.4 million people. Then there is the Sinosteel International Plaza, in the port city of Tianjin, whose undulating façade repeats hexagonal forms evoking honeycombs that not only allowed the building materials to be mass-produced, thus reducing energy and resource use during construction, but also take into account airflows and sunshine patterns across the site, minimizing heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer. Finally MAD’s protoplasmic circular design covered in horizontal bands of reflective steel for the Erdos Museum, in Erdos, Inner Mongolia, responds to the barren desert around it, where a new city is being rapidly built. The museum acts as a shell protecting those within from the unknown urban reality to come.

All MAD’s projects — from residential complexes and office towers to museums and cultural centers — reflect a preservationist’s desire to protect not buildings but the sociability, sense of community, and orientation toward nature that certain urban forms have fostered for centuries in cities like Beijing and Tokyo. The firm’s relationship to the architectural traditions of East Asia is apparent not in any kitsch decoration but in its efforts to adapt the best of those traditions to a contemporary context. This currently consists in transposing them to high-density cities where a top-down, cookie-cutter approach has been the norm. It’s the desire to strengthen the connections between the natural and the built environments and among neighbors sharing a patch of green that characterizes MAD’s architectural designs wherever they are realized.

"MAD Architects" originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2010 Table of Contents.