What do you do when you want to come up with an ingenious architecture that you are hoping to be a perfect mixture between creativity and eco-friendliness? Well, you ask some mad men to give you a hand. Don’t laugh at me, ‘cause I’m not kidding you! You can take these two words - “mad men” – as literally as you like.




Because the Chinese architects that some of you might have heard of, know under the name of MAD, (did I tell you that you’d better not laugh or did I not?) had one hell of an idea: to recreate the city center of Huaxi, a district in Guyiang, China. And in order to do that, MAD gathered 11 young international architects such as Atelier Manferdini (USA), BIG (Denmark), Dieguez Fridman (Argentina), EMERGENT/Tom Wiscombe (USA), HouLiang Architecture (China), Mass Studies (Korea), Rojkind Arquitectos (Mexico), Serie (UK/India) and Sou Fujimoto Architects (Japan).



The MAD architects and their guests were part of an urban experiment that was aimed at conceiving a masterplan which was to be developed by Shanghai Tongij Urban Planning and Design Institute, Studio 6, in collaboration with MAD.




Therefore, during a three-day workshop that took place in the summer of 2008, each participant had to bring an independent design for the final masterplan, according to “their own understanding and interpretation of the local natural and cultural elements”.




“The ecological method here is not just focused in saving energy; rather, the goal is to create a new, balanced urban atmosphere which can evoke the feeling of exploring the natural environment. The city is no longer determined by the leftover logic of the industrial revolution (speed, profit, efficiency), but instead follows the ‘fragile rules’ of nature. This collaborative experiment thus provides an alternative, responsive model for the development of the urban centre: a man-made symbiosis, in harmony with nature, in which people are free to develop their own independent urban experience”.

The purpose is indeed noble! You can make no question of it, but come on! Where is the privacy, guys, with those glass-made-of buildings? I can understand transparency, but this is a little bit too much!

(Source: Dvice)