Flora Lee, graduated from School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, joined MAD in 2008. She is an exceptional project manager with a multifaceted management capability that ranges from conceptual design to project coordination and communication with clients and developers. She has helped develop and realize a number of MAD’s major international projects, including: Gardenhouse, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Campinas Art Gallery of Brazil, East 34th in NYC, Paris UNIC and the Conrad Hotel in Beijing.

Los Angeles Office

Flora Lee, graduated from School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, joined MAD in 2008. She is an exceptional project manager with a multifaceted management capability that ranges from conceptual design to project coordination and communication with clients and developers. She has helped develop and realize a number of MAD’s major international projects, including: Gardenhouse, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Campinas Art Gallery of Brazil, East 34th in NYC, Paris UNIC   and the Conrad Hotel in Beijing. 

Cloud Center is a multi-purpose cultural venue for Aranya, a seaside arts community in Qinhuangdao, China. Located near the Beidaihe coastline, the building is conceived as a “floating cloud by the sea,” blending architecture with landscape and sky.

The structure houses a theater, exhibition hall, and press room within a flexible, open interior. Its cloud-like form is created through sweeping structural overhangs, with the largest extending 30 meters. These overhangs make the white mass appear to float above a transparent ground floor. A central core supports the structure, allowing for a column-free interior and adaptable event space.

The façade is made of hyperbolic white stained glass, giving the building a soft, reflective presence that changes with the light. Skylights bring natural light into the swirling ceiling of the main space, supporting both energy efficiency and the atmosphere.

A circular white stone garden surrounds the building, evoking a surreal, cosmic landscape. Pools and reflective surfaces blur the line between architecture and nature, creating a peaceful, otherworldly setting.



Aranya, China

Public

Aranya Cloud Center

Situated on the site of a traditional siheyuan courtyard dating back to 1725, Courtyard Kindergarten inserts a new building onto the historic site, forming a multi-layered urban narrative where old and new co-exist.

There is a saying in old Beijing: ‘three days without beating, and the child will scale the roof and rip off the tiles!’ Somehow, it describes the freedom of climbing up high and running on the roof hat children picture. MAD imagines the rooftop as a dynamic floating structure – a colourful playground, a magical place and an escape for children. Below the roof, the kindergarten’s open-concept layout serves multiple functions, offering a free and inclusive environment, with no boundaries or obstacles.

In its entirety, Courtyard Kindergarten merges seemingly conflicting architectural elements with the new design. It retains the authenticity of the original buildings, while creating new interaction between the old and the new. It offers children an understanding of history and space, preserving their inborn passion for freedom and pure imagination.


Beijing, China

Education

YueCheng Courtyard Kindergarten

Ephemeral Bubble is our installation for the 2024 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, located in Murono Village, Japan. Integrated into a century-old traditional house, the installation introduces a soft, translucent form that appears to emerge like a bubble from the wooden structure, adding a new, temporary space for gathering and reflection.

The biomorphic design draws from natural forms, emphasizing fluidity, lightness, and impermanence. The bubble’s surface reflects its surroundings, merging the old and new without imposing symbolism. This intentional “de-symbolization” allows the work to exist freely, bringing renewed cultural energy into the village without disrupting its historical context.

Inside, the bubble offers a spacious, undefined environment that can host performances, ceremonies, and informal gatherings. Soft light fills the interior, and the neutral palette reflects seasonal shifts in the surrounding landscape. The result is an immersive space for emotional and spiritual engagement.

By fusing contemporary design with a traditional rural setting, Ephemeral Bubble creates a space that is both rooted and transient, encouraging interaction while respecting the integrity of the site.


Echigo-Tsumari, Japan

Installation 

Yu Nagasaki，Rozita Kashirtseva，Valentina Olivieri，胡晋菖

Green Sigma Co.,Ltd.，Adachi Zoukeisha

朱雨蒙，Osamu Nakamura

Ephemeral Bubble

The Never Hut is a small-scale installation for the 2024 "Art at Qiaoshan – Nanhai Land Art Festival" in Foshan, Guangdong. Located in Yanqiao Village, a 600-year-old settlement known for its preserved Qing Dynasty architecture and lush river landscapes, the structure sits on the former playground of an abandoned village school.

The installation is a lightweight, movable cabin positioned within a wooded area beside a stream. Circular in plan, the structure features a broad overhanging eave that creates a low, shaded perimeter space for rest and gathering. The form resembles a small flying saucer, topped by three flexible, netted “antennae” constructed from repurposed local fishing materials. These sway gently with the wind, introducing a dynamic and playful element to the environment.

Designed for passive comfort, the open-ring structure allows cross-ventilation and natural shading while encouraging informal interaction with the landscape. The use of vivid colors under the eaves contrasts with the muted grey exterior, offering a warm and inviting spatial experience. Blending architectural precision with local material logic, the project reactivates a forgotten site as a public pavilion that reflects memory, place, and community use.



Foshan, China

The Never Hut

Floating Island is a vision for the World Trade Center site a horizontal, floating structure that challenges the verticality of traditional skyscrapers. Instead of a towering office block, the project proposes a suspended landscape that connects surrounding buildings while opening the ground to public life.

Designed for the digital era, it condenses business functions meeting spaces, media centers, and transport hubs into a compact core. Around it, public programs such as cinemas, parks, restaurants, and a man-made lake create a diverse, accessible urban environment.

By merging architecture with landscape, Floating Island encourages horizontal flow and social interaction, breaking the isolation of high-rise towers. It reimagines the WTC not as a symbol, but as a space for civic renewal where development becomes the memorial.


New York City, USA

Adaptive Reuse

Rebuilt World Trade Center

Timeless Beacon is an installation for the Art at Qiaoshan – 2022 Guangdong Nanhai Land Art Festival, located at the historic Taiping Market in Xiqiao, Nanhai. Once a vital trading hub along the Xijiang River, the market served as a gathering place for villagers, fishermen, and traders through the 1980s and 90s. With urbanization and digital commerce, its role diminished, and much of the village became quiet and underused.

The installation reactivates this site by engaging its emotional and historical layers rather than restoring its original function. A three-story building is wrapped in reflective material that mirrors the surrounding streetscape, visually blending architecture with its context. At its center, a tall multimedia light tower is draped in colorful fabric that flutters by day and illuminates at night. The structure becomes a glowing landmark for the village and river, symbolically linking past and future.

Timeless Beacon transforms a fading space into a site of reflection and imagination. The work speaks to resilience, memory, and renewal by turning an overlooked place into a shared visual experience. It invites visitors to reconsider the meaning of rural space and the evolving relationship between people, place, and time.


Timeless Beacon

Mirage is our proposal for the renovation of Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Designed by Ma Yansong, the scheme reimagines the controversial skyscraper often criticized as the “scar of Paris” as a large-scale optical installation that reflects its surroundings poetically and unexpectedly.

Completed in 1973, Montparnasse Tower stands as one of Paris’ tallest structures, but its imposing black form has long been seen as out of place within the city’s classical landscape. Our concept uses angled glass panels to create a concave façade that transforms the tower into a city-scale mirror.

The design reflects Paris’ rooftops and skyline onto the upper portion of the tower, while the sky appears mirrored on the lower section, blurring the boundary between architecture and atmosphere. From certain angles, iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower appear upside down in the tower’s reflection, creating a surreal and dreamlike effect.

Rather than erasing history, Mirage offers a new lens to interpret the past. Our approach is not to conceal the building’s presence but to soften its impact through reflection, light, and illusion inviting viewers to reconsider how architecture can engage with memory, scale, and its urban context.

Paris, France

Mirage - Montparnasse Tower

Quito, a city of coexisting contrasts influenced by its diverse ecosystems, ethnicities and traditions, is the capital of Ecuador and a UNESCO world heritage site, which features the best-preserved and least altered historic center in South America.

Inspired by its natural backdrop, MAD seeks to connect residents to the beauty of nature through the building’s dynamic design. Growing from the earth to the sky, Qondesa’s exterior facade emulates twisting vines weaving around the building to taper at its top, and sprout greenery which form planters throughout the building’s balconies. In addition, the exterior shape of Qondesa is designed so as not to block natural light and views from the surrounding buildings.


Quito, Ecuador

Mixed Use

Jon Kontuly, Xie Peng, Horace Hou, Edwin Cho, Matthew McFetrick

Uribe Schwarzkopf

Qondesa

Urban Forest is a high-rise tower for Chongqing, China’s youngest megacity. The project challenges conventional ideas of sustainability by reintroducing nature into dense urban environments, aiming to restore a sense of emotional connection to the natural world.
Inspired by Chongqing’s mountainous terrain and traditional Chinese philosophy, the tower mimics layered hillsides. Its staggered floors host sky gardens, open terraces, and green patios, creating multidimensional spaces for gathering, rest, and reflection. Instead of focusing on vertical power or high-tech systems, the design emphasizes harmony between people, architecture, and nature.

The building appears to dissolve into its environment, shaped by wind, light, and air. Its form breaks from the rigid verticality of traditional towers, offering a softer, more organic presence within the city.


Chongqing, China

Urban Forest Chonqing

“Clover House” is MAD’s first completed project in Japan. Clients Kentaro and Tamaki Nara would like to expand their school, and Clover House is where the clients’ school began as a humble operation from inside their family home. MAD proposed to retain aspects of the two-storey family home, and dynamically transform it into a fully developed educational institution.

The original wood structure are recycled and incorporated into the new design. Visibly present throughout the main learning area, a dynamic interior of translucent and enclosed spaces is formed to adapt to different teaching activities. Intimate spaces that create private and public in-between areas are formed, while windows are shaped in various geometries recognizable to the child’s eye, allowing sunlight to sift through and create an ever-changing play of shadows that encourage students’ curiosity and imagination. Clover House is constructed from a child’s point of view.

The new design’s skin wraps the old wooden structure like a piece of cloth, creating a blurry space between the new and the old – a pure white canvas of individuality that resembles a magical cave or a pop-up fort.
