Rising from the skyline like a sculptural twister, the Hainan Science Museum ‘floats’, showing off its design that connects every gallery in the museum via a single spiralling route. The public museum was designed by Ma Yansong and his firm MAD, and is located on the edge of Wuyuan River National Wetland Park, in Haikou, China.
Step inside the Hainan Science Museum
‘I wanted the project to be built on the idea of flow and chaos – space, function, and knowledge to flow into one another, freely,’ says Ma Yansong, founder and principal partner of MAD. ‘Different subjects should connect, overlap, and stay open. If artificial intelligence can already answer almost any question, a science museum's job is no longer to deliver facts. It is to teach children how to ask them.’
To accommodate this, the museum couldn’t be in a better location, with more than 30 schools and nurseries within a three-kilometre radius, and since its trial opening it has received more than 350,000 visitors in four months.
Much like MAD’s Cloudscape of Haikou library, and the sculptural Train Station in the Forest, the museum is also a dreamlike space, a sci-fi starship at the heart of the coastal spaceport. There are two entrances to the 46,528-square-meter space.
The upper-level entryway guides visitors down the ring-shaped galleries. It makes you feel like you're descending from the skies, as it takes visitors through deep space and the ocean, through to rainforests and tropical agriculture.
From the ground floor entrance, the journey is reversed – as visitors emerge into the starry sky above. The museum also includes a planetarium, a giant-screen cinema, and a sunken plaza.
This simple, yet effective, double-entry design allows for a clever, two interpretations of the building and its contents, making sure the visitor can choose, rather than be funnelled through a designated path.
Removing columns from the exhibition floors and staying true to MAD’s bold and sculptural design approach, the spiral structure is carried by three concrete core tubes. This allows for an open-plan ground level. The ring-shaped volume above seems to float mid-air, reflected in the pools beneath.
An unprescribed modus operandi is Yansong’s ability to transform a brief of functional requirements into a building that not only houses intriguing content (like the aforementioned train station), but also becomes a piece of content itself.