Building spaces for imagination

When architect Ma Yansong designed a museum in the Gobi Desert more than a decade ago, he kept seeing the same strange image in his mind: a futuristic spacecraft landing on a barren landscape.

Only later did Ma realize where the image had come from. It was a scene from Star Wars, a film that had stayed with him since childhood.

The building was the Ordos Museum in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Years later, it would play an unexpected role in bringing Ma to Los Angeles.

When the team behind the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art began searching around the world for architects to design the museum, they came across Ma's work in the desert. He was invited to compete for the project and ultimately won, beating a field that included some of architecture's best-known names.

More than a decade later, as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public in Los Angeles on Sept 22, Ma found a creative circle in the journey: a Western science-fiction image had helped inspire one of his early works in China, while that Chinese project helped lead him to a major cultural landmark in the United States.

Yet for Ma, the connection between the two buildings goes deeper than science fiction.

When he first visited the Los Angeles site, it was still largely a parking lot. What caught his attention were several large trees — and the children gathering beneath their shade.

"I thought the tree was very important," Ma says.

The sight prompted him to think about traditional Chinese academies and gardens, and about how people have long gathered beneath trees to learn, talk, and simply spend time together.

In Southern California, where shade can offer welcome relief from the heat, Ma began to imagine nature not as something separate from architecture, but as something that could protect and embrace people.

That early impression helped shape the building that now rises above Exposition Park: a vast, curving structure that appears to hover over the landscape, with a central arch spanning 57.8 meters and a form that deliberately resists easy definition.

The museum's campus has replaced an asphalt parking lot with gardens, more than 300 trees, meadows, a hanging garden, an amphitheater, and public spaces. The building rises lightly from the landscape, creating sheltered areas where people can gather beneath it.

Ma calls it a cloud. Visitors have told him it looks like a spaceship.

"Actually, it's everyone's imagination of the future," he says.

That ambiguity is important to Ma. A building does not have to announce exactly what it is. Instead, it can leave room for curiosity, memory and individual interpretation — much as a cloud can become whatever the viewer imagines.

This idea runs through Ma's architecture: buildings should not simply be objects to look at, but environments where people can create their own experiences.

The museum, founded by filmmaker George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, and his wife, Mellody Hobson, also a successful businesswoman, is itself devoted to the power of images to connect people across cultures and centuries.

Its collection brings together painting, illustration, comics, photography, murals and cinema, spanning visual storytelling from prehistory to works by artists including Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Norman Rockwell. Its inaugural exhibitions also draw from Lucas' personal archives, including Star Wars concept designs, props and costumes.

Lucas has described the museum as a place to honor humanity's stories and the artists who bring them to life.

"The artists in this collection did not just create images; they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions," Lucas says.

Hobson says the museum was designed so that people from different backgrounds could enter and find something that speaks to them.

"We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors," she says.

Ma's building offers another kind of storytelling — one told not through images or words, but through space.

From desert to dream

His understanding of the relationship between people and their surroundings goes back to Beijing, where he was born and raised.

For Ma, the idea that nature and human life belong together is not an abstract architectural theory. He absorbed it from the city itself.

Beijing's traditional landscape, he says, never drew a hard line between the built environment and nature. Places such as Jingshan Park, Beihai Park and Shichahai showed him how gardens, water, architecture and human activity could exist within a single environment.

In traditional Chinese culture, he says, nature was not merely a backdrop to human life. It was part of it.

That experience has shaped his long-running interest in what he calls the "shanshui city", or "city of mountains and water" — a modern city informed by the traditional Chinese relationship between people and nature. The concept has become a core design philosophy of MAD Architects and is reflected in many of Ma's works.

"We don't lack modern buildings today," he says. "What we lack is the relationship between people and nature."

For Ma, the answer is not to reproduce old Chinese buildings or decorate modern architecture with traditional motifs.

He has little interest in simply placing traditional Chinese forms onto contemporary buildings.

"Liking tradition doesn't necessarily mean copying tradition," he says.

Instead, he wants to understand what lies beneath those forms — the philosophy, aesthetics and understanding of human life that produced them in the first place — and ask whether those ideas can generate something new.

"Tradition is something internal," he says. "To bring it into the present, you still need innovation."

Tradition meets tomorrow

That thinking has developed through decades of experimentation in China.

One example is Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, a cultural project designed by Ma in Shenzhen's Nanshan district, in Guangdong province. Opened to the public in November 2025, the project reflects his interest in what he describes as a kind of "ancient future".

Rather than creating a conventional monumental building, Ma envisioned a vast structure that dissolves into the natural landscape, with stone-like forms and open spaces that allow people to move through it.

The result deliberately pushes architecture away from the idea of a landmark standing above its surroundings. Instead, the building becomes dispersed, with nature and people becoming the main subjects.

Ma sees this as a departure from the traditional idea of architecture as a symbol of authority. In his view, a building does not have to dominate a city to become meaningful.

The inspiration is closely connected to Chinese gardens. In a traditional Chinese garden, architecture does not necessarily demand attention. Paths turn unexpectedly, trees frame views, rocks and water create changing scenes, and the visitor becomes part of the composition.

"In Chinese gardens and traditional cities, landscape, architecture, poetry and everyday life were often intertwined," he says.

Ma rejects the idea that his work should be understood simply as a mixture of Eastern and Western styles.

He is more interested in what happens when a tradition develops its own contemporary language.

That may also be why the Lucas Museum resonates with his approach. A museum devoted to narrative has to leave space for the viewer, just as Ma's architecture leaves space for the visitor.

For Ma, architecture, like storytelling, becomes most alive when people can enter it and bring something of themselves.

In the end, he says, a building should not tell everyone the same story: "It isn't about telling everyone a story. It is about allowing everyone to have their own story."