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Qingyun Ma

Founding Partner | Chairman | Design Principal

AIA Architect

Della and Harry Mcdonald Chair

Member of Los Angeles Planning Commission

Former Dean, School of Architecture, University of Southern California

Qingyun Ma was born in 1965 in Xi’an, China. He obtained his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tsinghua University and his Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as a visiting professor and critic at renowned institutions such as Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania in the United States; and ETH Zurich, the Berlage Institute, and Berlin Technical University in Europe. He started his own architectural practice, MADA s.p.a.m., in New York in 1996, and moved his office to China in 1999. In the past 11 years, he has led the design team to yield substantial design results and complete a vast range of projects making MADA s.p.a.m. a global architecture firm, exemplifying Chinese contemporary design and practical ability. The company’s works have been successively exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 2002, Pompidou Art Center in 2003, European Art Year in 2004 and 2005, and Greece Petro in 2006, among others. MADA s.p.a.m. has entered in many international competitions and has won many special honors. He has also been awarded titles including Architecture Vanguard and New Trends Representative of Architecture in Europe and Asia.

He has become a representative of the Beijing Olympic Games Bidding Committee and worked as the Urban Planning Representative Expert to take part in the bid of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In 2006, Ma was appointed as the Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, becoming the first Chinese dean of a foreign university. In that same year, he founded American Academy of China, which received high political and economic attention in 2007. He was invited by the Shen Zhen government to be the chief curator of the 2007 Shen Zhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale on Urbanism and Architecture. Since 2009, Ma has been working as the architecture design consultant for urban development for the city of Los Angeles, and in 2010 was invited by Disney Headquarters in California to be a consultant for the Shanghai Disney Project. In 2010, Ma was named one of the World’s Most Influential Designers together with master architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. Most recently, he has been invited as a member of the Awards Committee Official Exhibitors for the 2010 Shanghai Expo.