By John Bentley Mays – Globe and Mail

Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. This novel tall-building scheme, you may recall, was the winning entry earlier this year in an international competition sponsored by Toronto-area developers Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Development Group. It kicked up a notable stir among architectural chatterers and other observers, and little wonder: In a suburb dotted by big, ordinary cereal-box apartment buildings, something this slinky and sexy was bound to be a hit.

Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Mr. Ma’s assertively cosmopolitan MAD Office is designing up a storm for various places in China, with much the same swing and verve its founder brought to Mississauga. The firm’s current focus tends to be institutional — a museum addition, cultural centres, an office-hotel complex and so on. But this year Mr. Ma is also scheduled to finish his first executed house: an unusual building that provides interesting (and also ominous) insights into this emerging architect’s imagination and design approach.

Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing, Rising House, as it’s called, is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters. Mr. Ma explained in a telephone interview that his idea in the design of Rising House was to reflect the rising and falling landscape of its mountainous neighbourhood, which is near the Great Wall. A river flowing by the building site called for unobstructed views from within the house, and the slope of the property also had to be acknowledged and incorporated into the design.

Mr. Ma’s response to the landscape is as bold as the Mississauga towers, but more two-fisted. The 2,700-square-foot Rising House is a massive piece of concrete poured in place. It features a broad sculptural movement from a one-storey element (the entryway and sheltered parking area) up to the main body of the house, which stands two storeys tall on a moulded concrete platform. In a deliberate homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s classic Farnsworth House — the original of all the much-hated and much-loved glass boxes in American architecture for the last 50 years — Mr. Ma has made the downstairs part of Rising House (like the Farnsworth House) a unified, continuous doughnut of space flowing without interruption around a central core, which is dedicated to the kitchen. When completed, this spacious room will be enclosed (again like the Farnsworth House) by expanses of glass, hung ceiling to floor. Surely no river has ever gotten a more generous overlook than the one given by Mr. Ma to the stream that flows by Rising House.

Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing is Rising House, as it’s called, a Ma designed building that is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters.
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Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing is Rising House, as it’s called, a Ma designed building that is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters.

On the upper level, the concrete mass is articulated, conventionally, into four bedrooms and a family room. Less conventional is the addition of a narrow swimming pool on this upper level. An operable skylight allows this pool to be open to the sky or roofed, as the residents wish. But this pool is for more than just swimming. A strip window in its side, below surface level, scatters filtered sunlight into the large interior below, creating a shimmer on ceiling, walls and floor that repeats the sparkle of sunshine on the river outside. When the light is right, this play with illumination should give the concrete dwelling the sense of a grotto: looming and faintly mysterious, radiant with flickers and flashes.

When the light is less than right, Mr. Ma’s house may well seem somewhat obtuse. Boosting aloft the ponderous weight of the second storey, and making it seem to float on walls of glass, he has kept the building from becoming glowering and bunker-like. Yet it is hard not to see in the sloping profile of Rising House an expressway ramp, or the ramps between floors in a parking garage — tough, blue-collar concrete forms, in other words, that are considerably less lyrical than the landscape Mr. Ma intends them to look like. Quite apart from these unfortunate allusions, there is an abiding aesthetic problem with the house: the too-drastic contrast between the weightiness of all that concrete poured into one large crouching form, and the almost dainty delicacy of the glass wall enclosing the bottom storey. Mr. Ma loves to make strong gestures, as we have learned from the formal play of the Absolute towers — but in Rising House he has almost certainly hit the ground too hard.

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