A "mountain village" designed by Chinese firm MAD Architects has been completed for a setting described as "vague" and "mysterious".
Located near the ancient villages of Hongcun and Xidi in China’s eastern Anhui province, the development aims to provide modern living in a "culturally important mountain range", said the architects.
Mad Architects/Shu He
Part of a tourism masterplan for Huangshan Taiping Lake, the 10 buildings of the Huangshan Mountain Village vary in height and appearance, and have been designed to blend into the mountain views.
MAD calls it a new type of village landscape, "one where architecture becomes nature, and nature dissolves into architecture".
Mad Architects/Laurian Ghinitoiu
The apartments are intended as quiet retreats where people can "reconnect with nature on a spiritual level".
Work on the 1,186,520 sq m project began in 2009.
Mad Architects/Fernando Guerra
Ma Yansong, founder of MAD architects, said: "The impression we have of Taiping Lake in Huangshan is vague: each visit to this place yields different views, different impressions. It is a bit mysterious, like ancient Shanshui landscape paintings that are never based on realism, but rather, the imagination. This inexplicable feeling is always poetic; it is obscure and indistinct.
"This is the basic idea: we hope that residents will not just look at the scenery, but see themselves in relation to this environment, attention that is brought inward. In observing oneself, one perhaps begins to notice a different self than the one present in the city."
Top image courtesy of Mad Architects/Laurian Ghinitoiu
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Is this a case of the ’emperor’s new clothes’?
They are making an outrageous claim in the hope that no-one will speak out for fear of looking foolish?
Well then, here goes!!
That development doesn’t, and never will, “blend into the mountain views”. It’s hideously modern in a beautiful natural setting and should never have been built.
Couldn’t agree more with you Brian. Claiming that this development is in harmony with its surroundings is laughable. There doesn’t seem to be any use of natural materials nor for that matter any attempt to camouflage its existence, not that the people who can afford to buy these types of properties should care about that.