Interview with Ma Qingyun

Ma Qingyun is Borned in 1965, he obtained his bachelor’s degree of Civil Engineering from the Architecture Department of Tsinghua University. In 1991 he attended the Graduate School of Fine Art, University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 he found MADA s.p.a.m, a New York based architecture consultancy, before moving to Shanghai in 2000; Appointed as the Dean of School of Architecture, University of Southern Galifornia.

Domus: You will soon accept the post as the Dean of School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. What new measures will you be introducing in the teaching field?
Ma Qingyun: I will definitely be taking some new measures in the first few years of my term, in mainly two aspects: first, by forming a better transnational scientific research method that is interdisciplinary, especially for the postgraduate research institute. The conventional design lessons or discussion on the academic history will probably be discarded and more emphasis will be put on the communication between different colleges and between nations.
Second, I will draw in and invest in more outstanding young architects from all over the world, making them key students in our university.

Domus: With which schools or institutions are you inclined to cooperate?
Ma Qingyun: It depends on each specific project; cooperating partners could be different universities, academies, research institutions, developers or governmental subdivisions.

Domus: I noticed that you have divided your office into seven “grades” according to which everyone greets each other with either “teacher” or “student” at a party of your company. You are also called “teacher”, I find that interesting… what was the idea behind this?
Ma Qingyun: One of the reasons we do this is that it raises our work and management efficiency levels. In the working process, it’s not advocated to discuss who is right, it should simply be clear that the monitor or the teacher is right. In order to ensure efficiency discussion should be postponed until the work has been done, something similar to the army. Another reason is that the majority of our colleagues are rather young, so that they are already used to such greetings. One extraordinary advantage of young groups is that they have no fixed ideas, therefore new ideas can excite them and we fill them with all of our passion and energy. This kind of creative power cannot be underestimated.

Domus: What was the secret to your management success with the MADA s.p.a.m. How did you maintain the consistent work quality while running a young group with rather high mobility?
Ma Qingyun: I do believe we have superiority management skills. Our group was quite young and some say none of them could independently complete a set of project drawings, but together we have completed many projects. Furthermore, our company is spread across China in Shanghai, Ning Bo, Beijing and Xi’an. Because of this high mobility, over half of the staff in my office cannot clearly define where their position is. But the reason why we maintain a constant work quality under such chaotic circumtances is that we base the management of our office not on people but on ideas. This is our foundation. More specifically, at what state of operations should we begin a certain phase? For instance, if we were carrying out a project in Xi’an Programming Bureau and the vice mayor who is also able to accept bold ideas, and we would persuade them to accept it completely. This way you don’t need to pay attention to the draftsmen.
In the process of managing people, ideas may change at any time. If you hold conferences with experts, or if the leaders don’t agree with your plan, you still ask your architects to insist on their original plans. However, they may still make some changes according to the client’s instructions because they don’t want to be up all night making new drafts if the original plan has been denied again. If you persuade the relevent parties to accept your ideas from the very beginning, they might even ask that your draft be even more radical or include more trendy details, and then the draftsmen or the planners will think:” Maybe I should have been more daring and insisted on my plan, that was what they wanted!” Therefore, managing ideas is what an office should strive to do, not manage people.

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