Ma Yansong's first museum in Europe is a ‘metaphor' for migration

Fast Company

21-05-2025

BY
Ma Yansong is gesturing at a spiraling staircase inside the atrium of a building. The founder of MAD Architects —the Chinese firm behind the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles—is in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to inaugurate the opening of his first museum in Europe, and he is talking about movement. Of forms, yes, but mostly of people.
The museum, called Fenix, sits on the edge of Rotterdam's historic port, which was also the first Chinatown in continental Europe. It was here, from the banks of the River Maas, where millions of emigrants—Albert Einstein included—boarded ships toward North America in search of better opportunities. And it is here, in the building that once housed the world's largest harbor storage warehouse for the Holland America Line, that Yansong has come to reflect on the meaning of migration.
Bureau Polderman. MAD's tangled staircase connects both floors, then swoops out through the roof into a panoramic platform that offers sprawling views of the city. 'I think it's an architectural element, but it's also a metaphor; it has a storytelling function,' Yansong says.
'It's not about numbers'
Fenix is opening at a time in which migrants around the world are being vilified, humiliated, deported. The EU has been hardening its migration policy for years, and hard-right parties are fast gaining ground —in the Netherlands as well. Since President Donald Trump took office, he has shifted nearly every aspect of U.S immigration policy to constrict regular immigration pathways, deport primarily black and brown immigrants living in the U.S. regardless of their legal status or criminal history, and instill fear among those who remain.
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