Founder and principal partner of Beijing- and Los Angeles-based MAD Architects, MA Yansong, kicked off the day with a presentation of his work, which fuses the latest technology with a contemporary interpretation of traditional Asian responses to nature—from his rippling residential towers, Huangshan Mountain Village, to the dramatically rolling forms of his Harbin Culture Center, both in China. “Some say my work is futuristic,” said the architect. “But for me it is reminiscent of the canyon, the desert—something that has been there forever. I want people to experience these buildings and wonder about their place in this long history.”
Henry Cheung, who trained as an architect and is now a design director at innovation consultancy IDEO, talked about the architect’s role as visionary, asking, “How do we inject creativity into a profession that is so restricted?” But if anyone in the audience was dismayed by his sobering reminder of codes and other real-world constraints, they were quickly swept into the fantastical explorations and experimental work of David Benjamin, who presented his biodegradable mycelium brick tower installation for MoMA’s PS1 last summer; his immersive theater for musician Björk, rendered as a physical manifestation of one of her other-worldly compositions; and his intrepid work with a mussel population in New York’s East River. Sheila Kennedy, who directs material research for Boston’s Kennedy & Violich Architecture, continued the science-fiction foray with her investigations into infusing plants with nanoparticles to harvest energy and create luminescence.
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