Xu Chen, RIBA Registered Architect, joined MAD in 2015. Xu Chen focuses on the relationship between cities, sites and architecture. In design practice, he is good at thinking and realizing ideal architectural solutions from multiple levels, including environment, aesthetics, function and technology, and has rich experience in large-scale projects from design to detail deepening and building construction, as well as the ability to design under strict control. He is also an excellent team manager. Xu Chen has led and participated in projects including Quzhou Sports Park,Tencent Dachanwan, Beijing Baiziwan Social Housing, Xiamen Xinhee Design Center, and Shenzhen Bay Culture Park.

Beijing Office

Xu Chen, RIBA Registered Architect, joined MAD in 2015. Xu Chen focuses on the relationship between cities, sites and architecture. In design practice, he is good at thinking and realizing ideal architectural solutions from multiple levels, including environment, aesthetics, function and technology, and has rich experience in large-scale projects from design to detail deepening and building construction, as well as the ability to design under strict control. He is also an excellent team manager. Xu Chen has led and participated in projects including Quzhou Sports Park, Tencent Dachanwan, Beijing Baiziwan Social Housing, Xiamen Xinhee Design Center, and Shenzhen Bay Culture Park.

Baiziwan Social Housing is an affordable housing project in Beijing. Located near the CBD, the project provides 4,000 rental units across 12 buildings and is designed to support diverse groups, including young professionals, seniors, and welfare-dependent residents. As a response to China’s growing urban housing challenges, Baiziwan rethinks public housing through a human-centered, sustainable approach.

Breaking away from the closed superblock model common in Chinese urban planning, we divided the site into six smaller blocks organized along a central public avenue. This creates an open, walkable neighborhood, with shops, cafes, kindergartens, and elderly care services at the street level to foster urban vitality.

Above the ground floor, a resident-only “floating garden” spans the second level, offering interconnected roof parks with gyms, playgrounds, and gardens creating a multi-layered public realm that integrates nature and community life. Across the site, stepped Y-shaped building forms enhance daylight access for all units, while north-facing corridors reduce thermal loss.

Over 80% of construction is prefabricated to reduce waste and improve build quality. Two buildings meet passive house standards, cutting energy use by 90%. With 47% green coverage, flexible unit layouts, and sustainable infrastructure, Baiziwan sets a new benchmark for social housing in China.

The project reflects our long-term research into social housing, advocating for a new model that centers on people, nature, and social integration.



Beijing, China

Residential

Baiziwan Social Housing

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.


Education

YueCheng Courtyard Kindergarten

East 34th our vision for a new type of New York City high-rise one that blends architecture and nature. Located near the Empire State Building, the tower challenges the rigid, power-driven expression of traditional skyscrapers. Instead of a sharp, imposing crown, the building features a deep-tinted glass curtain wall that gradually transitions into a transparent, fluid cap, dissolving into the sky.

The design rises from the Manhattan grid like an organic form, with soft, undulating surfaces that oppose the stacked plates of industrial-era towers. It introduces a more human and ecological language to the city’s dense modernist skyline.

At ground level, a commercial podium combines retail and public amenities, anchored by a multi-story atrium and vertical green wall offering moments of nature in the urban environment. Inside, double-height communal areas and shared amenities foster social connection and a sense of community among residents. These spaces reimagine vertical living as an immersive experience in “urban nature.”

‘East 34th’ proposes a gentler, more integrated future for high-density development one that shifts away from dominance and instead explores softness, connection, and coexistence with the surrounding city and environment.


New York City, USA

EAST 34th NYC

Appearing so evident amidst a thriving metropolitan district of Harbin, China, spanning 200 meters in length, the China Wood Sculpture Museum sits as a locational anomaly, seemingly out of place, surrounded by a densely populated Chinese-style neighborhood and residential complexes. The museum embodies some of the foremost conceptual and formal ideals that define the work of MAD, bringing out an expression and abstraction of nature to an otherwise quotidian surrounding. The boundaries between solid and liquid are blurred throughout this 13,000 sqm building, referencing the local natural scenery and landscape.

The building's exterior is covered by polished steel plates, mirroring the surroundings and the changing light. The solid walls ensure minimal heat loss while the breaking and twisting motion of the emerging skylights splits the surface and allows in light from the low-hanging sun of northern China; this provides sufficient natural diffused illumination to the three halls on the interior.

The museum mainly houses local wood sculptures as well as paintings depicting the ice and snow of the regional scenery. In the context of the large-scale modern urban setting, the museum itself serves as a new interpretation of nature. The surreal interaction between the museum and the city breaks through the tedium of the urban shell, revitalizing the surroundings with a new cultural feature.


Harbin, China

Culture

Yu Kui, Daniel Gillen, Bas van Wylick, Diego Perez, Jordan Kanter, Liu Huiying, Huang Wei, Julian Sattler, Liu Weiwei, Tang Liu, Mao Peihong, Maria Alejandra Obregon, Nickolas Urano, Gus Chan, Shin Park, Alejandro Gonzalez

The Architectural Design and Research Institute of Harbin Institute of Technology 

Inhabit Group

Gehry Technologies

Zhejiang Jing Gong Steel Structure Co. Ltd.

Wood Sculpture Museum

“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.


Okazaki, Japan

Clover House

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.


Adaptive Reuse

Rebuilt World Trade Center

The “Marilyn,” is a door handle designed in collaboration with Olivari for Milan Design Week. Inspired by our “Absolute Towers” in Mississauga nicknamed the “Marilyn Monroe Towers” for their soft, curving silhouette the handle echoes the same fluid movement in miniature.

The door handle represents the first point of physical connection between a person and a space. With this in mind, “Marilyn” was designed to feel intuitive and natural from the moment of touch. Its sinuous form gently twists, referencing the continuous rotation of the towers while providing a smooth, ergonomic experience.

The horizontal curve fits easily into the palm, while the vertical surface invites the thumb to rest comfortably, offering a quiet but meaningful interaction with form.


Milan, Italy

Product

Li Guangchong, Sean Tan, Hiroki Fujino

Olivari

Marilyn Handle

‘MAD IN CHINA’, the solo design exhibition of MAD, opened in the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), Copenhagen on November 2, 2007. This is the second exhibition of MAD in Europe following their 2006 Venice show. The exhibition is on view through January 2008.

Over the last 20 years, China has become known as the factory of the world. “Made in China” is globally recognised as symbolising cheap products and low quality. However, in the post-globalization era, the whole world has set its eyes on China, a country that is advancing rapidly in economy, culture, and art as well as in other realms. A new generation of architects and designers is in the middle of creating a multi-layered social identity, transforming the economic strength and individual dreams into a new kaleidoscope of size, height, space, and shape.

Kent Martinussen, the director of DAC, remarked that MAD IN CHINA is not merely an exhibition of an emerging new firm. Rather, the firm’s controversial social dimension brings a new perspective on China to the West. China begins to make its own rules, no longer subject to the taste of foreign countries.
The show features arresting design proposals from the socially conscious architecture firm. In MAD’s most visionary, politically daring design, “Beijing 2050,” the studio has quite literally gone mad with futuristic visions for a densely populated city in the year 2050, including a blueprint for transforming Tiananmen Square into a sprawling, forested parkland.

The show also includes other major works of MAD: The 800-metre Guangzhou Twin Towers take a humorous and critical look at the tradition of skyscraper as architectural icon while referencing Chinese pop culture; ‘Fish Tank’ is a reflection on mass-produced housing in an industrialized society. Visionary projects currently headed towards construction, such as Toronto’s highly-publicized Absolute Tower, and Tianjin, China’s culturally significant Sinosteel International Plaza, are examples of the office’s forward-thinking spaces that are quickly becoming reality. One item in the exhibition, the Denmark Pavilion, confronts the associations with ‘Made in China’, and features materials produced and refined in China, but later shipped to Europe for assembly. With each project, an idiosyncratic voice rises with the boldness and creativity to confidently step forward among the global architecture scene.

Copenhagen, Denmark

Exhibition

MAD in China - DAC

Freedom is a large-scale installation for Milan Design Week 2021, commissioned by Interni magazine. Installed in the courtyard of the Università degli Studi di Milano, it symbolizes renewal and the human desire to move beyond limitation in a post-pandemic world.

The work depicts a seabird looking skyward, ready for flight representing freedom, openness, and inclusivity. Positioned between shelter and exposure, the installation reflects the uncertainty experienced during the pandemic.

Constructed from metallic profiles by Eurostands and illuminated with LED strips from Ledvance, the structure glows at night, enhancing its presence and emotional tone.

For Ma Yansong, the seabird reflects the need to transcend both physical and invisible boundaries in pursuit of connection. The motif also appears in MAD’s FENIX Museum of Migration, linking themes of movement and identity.


Installation 

Alessandro Fisalli, Elena Bellocchio, Francesco Nardacci

Freedom

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park will see an ambitious urban development project that brings a vibrant cultural complex along the waterfront in Shenzhen, China. Numerous high-rises emerged over the past decade have become a contrasting backdrop for MAD’s design of the culture park: a 9.7-hectare piece of land occupied by a Museum of Craft and Design, and a Museum of Life and Science.

The scheme introduces a surreal, large-scale scene into the cityscape: an earth-sheltered architecture – an expansive green surface with a staggered layout of sculpturesque stones resting above, quietly settling into the landscape. Public exhibition spaces are spread across the ground floor, sunken into the ground.

The galleries speak to the surreal exterior, providing visitors with a unique experience that takes them on a journey through time and space. The stone-shaped buildings are mirrored on the interior, delivering flexible and stunning architectural effects. Reaching a height of 30 meters, it can house an exhibition of 5,000 sqm spread out horizontally. Natural light penetrates the exhibition space through subtle openings along the facade of the semi-concealed stones with stairs inviting visitors to climb up.
