‘Uneternal City’ 11th Venice Architecture Biennale
Type: Urban Concept

Along with shopping malls, petrol stations and branches of McDonalds, the old Chinatown renders all cities boring and alike. It is nothing more than restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings, representing a kitsch image of contemporary China with no real life inside. It is a historical theme park that poisons the urban space. There must be a shock therapy to remedy this situation.

Superstar: A Mobile China Town is MAD's response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date nature of the contemporary Chinatown. Rather than a sloppy patchwork of poor construction and nostalgia, the Superstar is a fully integrated, coherent, and above all modern upgrade of the 20th century Chinatown model. It's a place to enjoy Chinese food, quality goods and cultural events; a place to create and produce, where citizens can use workshops to study, design and realize their ideas.

Equally important to what this neo-community contains is how it operates. Superstar: A Mobile China Town is a benevolent virus that releases unknown energy in between unprincipled changes and principled steadiness. It can land at every corner of the world, exchanging the new Chinese energy with the environment where it stays. It's self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste. It's a living place, with authentic Chinese nature and health resorts, sports facilities and drinkable reservoirs, even a digital cemetery to remember the deceased. It's a travelling Olympic party that can journey to the host city every four years. The Superstar is a dream that's home to 15,000 people. No hierarchy, no hyponymy, only a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.

The Superstar's first destination will be the periphery of Rome. The Superstar will provide an unexpected, ever-changing future embedded in the Eternal past.

Welcome to the Superstar, the Chinatown of today.

Director in Charge: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
Design Team: Fu Changrui, Zhengtao, Fernie Lai, Chen Shuyu, David William Nightingale, Matthias Werner Helmreich, Bryan Alan Oknyansky, Zach Hines