From the bridge connecting bustling downtown Harbin to bucolic Sun Island, the new Harbin Opera House comes into view, with its impressive sloping forms that suggest the snow-capped mountains found in this northern Chinese region. Emerging from the surrounding wetlands, the building’s double-humped silhouette rises to an apex of 183 feet and curls around mounds of glass panels that appear to burst forth like spikey balloons.
Designed by MAD Architects, which has offices in Beijing and Los Angeles, the 850,000-square-foot theater complex serves as a glittering new icon for a city once known mostly for its winter snow festival. MAD, founded by Yale-trained Ma Yansong in 2004, won the commission for the project in an international competition in 2010. “As a public building, it has to be an open, accessible place,” says Ma. “It has to be dramatic. When people enter it, they need to feel they’re onstage, that they’re performers,” adds Ma, who was chosen last year to design Star Wars producer George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago. Ma completed his first project in Harbin in 2013, the 656-foot-long China Wood Sculpture Museum.
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