MAD Architects, Huangshan Mountain Village, China

Preserving the character of natural landscapes constitutes one of the challenges being addressed by builders of the 21st century, including the members of the Chinese firm MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, Qun Dang, and Yosuke Hayano and working mainly from Beijing, which recently completed Huangshan Mountain Village, a complex comprising ten apartment blocks located in a UNESCO World Heritate Site, near the ancient villages of Hongcun and Xidi, in Anhui province. The project presents a composition of terraces aligned with the original topography of some of China’s most beautiful mountains, emulating the form of the surrounding tea fields.