Blue Sky Thinking: MAD Presents Cloud Corridor, “the Future of Residential Design in LA”

Ma Yansong is never one to shy away from big ideas. Not long after revealing his firm’s first residential project in the United States — the green-walled 8600 Wilshire in Beverly Hills, Calif. — the Chinese champion of sustainable cities has conceived a new scheme for Los Angeles, scaling up his utopian concepts to a gargantuan scale in the City of Angels.

The visionary “Cloud Corridor” masterplan reimagines the skyscraper typology, proposing a series of interconnected towers as an antidote to Los Angeles’ infamous urban sprawl. Residential units are interspersed with public spaces including parks and gardens all the way up each tower, fostering social cohesion with shared natural environments far above the city.

MAD describes this cluster of towers as a “vertical village,” currently a popular phrase among big name firms in the United States, having been used by Bjarke Ingels in his trailer for the upcoming 2 World Trade Center tower in New York. The project forms a continuation of Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” ideology, embracing the architect’s desire to create buildings that “manifest the spiritual essence between nature and people.”

In accordance with this philosophy, a garden, patio, or courtyard space is provided for every unit, offering inhabitants a luscious retreat from the frenetic city streets below. Sky bridges and multilevel terraces offer residents different choices for traversing the complex with a variety of external public spaces designed to “propel nature into the everyday life of the city.”

This concept is further reinforced with the design of the street-level podium, a transportation hub topped with a generous green space for public use. The “podium as park” is proposed as a social counterpart to the adjacent Museum Row, giving people somewhere to gather and relax after the various cultural institutions are closed for the day.

Cloud Corridor is currently on view at the A+D Museum’s inaugural exhibition “Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles” until November 6^th, 2015.