why MAD’s ma yansong made TIME’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people

Ma Yansong’s Poetic Architecture celebrated in time100 list

Ma Yansong, the founder and principal of MAD, has always believed that architecture should touch the soul as much as it shapes the skyline. This year, TIME magazine named him to its 2025 list of the 100 Most Influential People, a recognition that places him among the global figures redefining culture, design, and society. As part of the architect’s official TIME profile, filmmaker and longtime collaborator George Lucas reflects on Ma’s work with characteristic enthusiasm:

‘I have been a fan of architect Ma Yansong from his earliest works. His designs never cease to amaze and inspire me. This year, he has unveiled projects that include a striking building in Denver that takes inspiration from canyons, and Fenix, a spiraling new art museum in the Netherlands that explores human migration. Like his mentor, the great Zaha Hadid, he has been at the forefront of a massive change in architecture that will transform our structures for generations.’

Ma Yansong, TIME100, portrait © Getty Images

For more than two decades, the TIME-recognized architect Ma Yansong (see the full TIME100 here) has been quietly reshaping the conversation around what cities can be — favoring curves over corners, emotional resonance over spectacle, and a human connection to nature over pure functionality. His Beijing-based studio, MAD, has built a body of work that blends architecture, art, and landscape into a unified whole.

From the canyon-sliced residential tower One River North in Denver to the cloud-like form of the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, his recent projects are less about domination and more about experience. Whether carving new museums into industrial warehouses in Rotterdam, sinking parks into Shenzhen’s urban coastline, or transforming historic tunnels in Japan into portals of light, Ma continues to ask: how can architecture bring a deeper sense of meaning and wonder to the modern world?

Ma Yansong, portrait for TIME | image courtesy MAD

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park

At the edge of China’s rapidly developing city of Shenzhen, MAD’s Shenzhen Bay Culture Park is entering its final phase of construction ahead of its September 2025 opening. Conceived as a vast green and civic complex along the waterfront, the project weaves together cultural spaces including a science and technology museum, a creative design hall, and a library, all recessed into the landscape beneath sloping green roofs. The design contrasts the relentless verticality of Shenzhen’s urban fabric with a grounded, open public environment, aiming to create a slower, more introspective rhythm along the city’s coastline.

MAD, Shenzhen Bay Culture Park | image © MIR

Framed by two monumental, stone-like pavilions, Shenzhen Bay Culture Park captures the tension between the forces of rapid modernization and the timeless serenity of the sea. Inside, large flexible galleries, flooded with natural light, are designed to host everything from immersive installations to theatrical performances. By blending architecture, landscape, and civic life, the project signals Ma Yansong’s ambition to use architecture as a means of nurturing collective identity and offering urban spaces back to the public.

MAD, Shenzhen Bay Culture Park | image © MIR

Quzhou Sports Park

Further inland, in Zhejiang Province, MAD’s Quzhou Sports Park demonstrates a different articulation of monumental public architecture — one that dissolves into its surroundings. Covering nearly 700,000 square meters, the park is anchored by a 30,000-seat stadium that emerges as a continuation of the natural topography rather than an object placed atop it. Instead of designing a fortress-like arena, Ma Yansong envisions a landscape of rolling hills and accessible green space where the boundaries between architecture and nature blur.

MAD, Quzhou Sports Park | image © Aogvision

Supported by sixty sets of exposed concrete column walls and capped with a translucent, ocean-wave-like canopy, the stadium invites visitors to engage with it long after games end. Whether climbing the grassy slopes or walking beneath the floating canopy, visitors experience a building that breathes with its environment. For Ma, Quzhou Sports Park embodies a ‘spiritual connection’ between people and the land — a conviction that architecture should invite exploration rather than impose itself.

Quzhou Sports Park | image © Aogvision

One River North

In Denver, Colorado’s rapidly transforming River North Art District, One River North brings Ma’s land-art sensibility into the vertical dimension. Completed in 2024, the sixteen-story residential tower is defined by a dramatic canyon-like crevice that cuts through its sleek glass facade, filled with cascading terraces and water features. Inspired by Colorado’s rugged mountain landscapes, the design evokes the sensation of inhabiting a natural canyon within the city, offering a new typology for urban living.

MAD, One River North | image © Arch-Exist

The central ‘canyon,’ stretching from the sixth to ninth floors, not only an aesthetic gesture, it offers residents communal gardens, shaded walkways, and immersive encounters with nature. This integration of greenery, water, and sculptural form into the urban tower typology reinforces Ma’s belief that architecture should create emotional and sensorial experiences. By merging landscape and architecture, One River North reimagines the future of high-density urban housing as a lived, tactile encounter with the natural world.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

In Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is steadily taking form in Exposition Park, showcasing one of MAD’s most ambitious and technically complex designs. Spearheaded by filmmaker George Lucas, the museum’s undulating, biomorphic structure lifts lightly above the ground, supported at only a few points. Its flowing silhouette, clad in over 1,500 custom fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, transforms the site’s former parking lots into a shaded public oasis.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art | visualization courtesy the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Inside, the building’s fluid forms continue, rejecting right angles in favor of curved walls and open, light-filled galleries. A vast oculus punctuates the center of the building, offering views of the sky and serving as a symbolic heart for the museum. Beyond its galleries, the museum also houses theaters, classrooms, and rooftop gardens — all designed to create a new community gathering space in South LA. Like many of Ma’s works, the Lucas Museum aims to embody a cultural landscape in motion.

Fenix Museum of Migration

Soon to open its doors in Rotterdam, the Fenix Museum of Migration embodies MAD’s ability to adapt and intervene in historic settings with bold, sculptural moves. Occupying the century-old Fenix Warehouse, the museum is anchored by the Tornado staircase, a double-helix structure clad in reflective stainless steel that spirals thirty meters skyward. Designed in collaboration with Bureau Polderman, the staircase serves both as circulation and as a symbolic representation of migration’s many paths and upheavals.

Fenix Museum of Migration | visualization courtesy MAD Architects

Visitors ascend through the museum’s atrium, gaining shifting perspectives of both the exhibits and the harbor beyond. By threading contemporary form through the industrial shell of the warehouse, Ma creates a layered narrative of past and future, permanence and movement. The grand opening on May 16th, 2025, will mark the transformation of a historic port site into a beacon for global storytelling and cultural exchange.

Tunnel of Light

Finally, in Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari region, MAD’s Tunnel of Light offers a more intimate yet no less powerful expression of Ma Yansong’s ethos. Commissioned for the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, the project revives the historic Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel with a series of immersive installations inspired by the five elements of nature. From mirrored hot springs to colorful passageways and reflective observation points, each intervention invites visitors to experience nature not as a backdrop but as an active participant.

MAD, Tunnel of Light, Periscope 2nd floor | image © Nacasa & Partners inc.

The culmination of the journey is the Light Cave, where polished stainless steel walls and a shallow pool reflect the dramatic rock formations and turquoise waters outside. In reimagining the tunnel as a sequence of poetic, participatory encounters, Ma transforms a once-forgotten piece of infrastructure into a living artwork — one that reconnects visitors to the land and revitalizes the surrounding community. It’s a reminder of the power Ma Yansong sees in architecture: not just to build, but to heal, to inspire, and to reawaken a sense of wonder in the world around us.

project info:

architect: Ma Yansong, Founder of MAD