Yansong Ma likes buildings to float. He likes them to bend and swivel and – he hopes, one day – to shoot up from mushroom-like stems and spread out in horizontal disks across the sky. It is not only the Chinese landscape that Ma, a 32-year-old architect from Beijing, wants to transform. It’s the Chinese notion of creativity itself.

Until a year and a half ago, no developer in China – where the biggest, fastest building boom in human history is taking place – would touch one of Ma’s utopian plans. But when in May 2006 an international jury chose Ma’s shimmering, twisting, 56-storey residential design to be built in Mississauga, Canada, it made him China’s first architect to win a competition overseas. All the 500 units in the Absolute Tower – dubbed the “Marilyn Monroe building” for its smooth, gyrating curves – sold in a day, prompting Ma to design a second, smaller building that also sold out instantly.