Huangshan Mountain Village in China by MAD Architects

On the shore of Taiping Lake among beautiful Huangshan mountains, the renowned Chinese architecture practice MAD Architects has designed a multi-story residential complex Huangshan Mountain Village. The complex, which is a part of a larger tourism masterplan for Huangshan Taiping Lake, is a great example of harmonious relationships between architecture and natural environment.

Composed in deference to the local topography, each building of the complex is diverse in height and appearance, and has been designed to ensure that the original mountain levels are maintained. Organized in a linked configuration across the southern slope of Taiping Lake, the dynamic relationship that is created among the ten buildings establishes a new type of village landscape: one where architecture becomes nature, and nature dissolves into architecture.

Each apartment of the complex is designed as a quiet retreat and features an expansive balcony which organic lines respond to the topographic contours of the immediate mountainous terrain. With their shape informed by the tea fields nearby, they appear as if they have been sculpted by wind and water, with no two the same.

The design of Huangshan Mountain Village is a realization of MAD Architects founder Ma Yansong’s Shanshui City philosophy which takes inspiration from Chinese landscape paintings and aims to establish a space where people can reconnect with nature. ‘The impression we have of Taiping Lake in Huangshan is vague,’  Ma Yansong said. ‘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.’