ARCHITECTURAL FOCUS
A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself.
On the frontline of China’ s space ambitions, a museum for the families next door- Hainan has quietly become part of China’ s scientific infrastructure. The country’ s only coastal spaceport sits on the island’ s east coast and has carried more than 40 launches since 2016, including missions to the Moon and Mars. The museum, named one of Hainan Province’ s“ Top Ten Public Cultural Facilities,” frames science not as a distant subject, but as something already happening in everyday life.
With more than 30 schools and kindergartens within a three-kilometer radius, Ma conceived the building from the first sketch as civic infrastructure for the families around it, closer to a public library than a destination landmark. A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself. Parents wait, students meet, residents pass through on the way home, and the lobby reads less like an atrium than a town square under a roof.
Architecture: One Spiral, Two Journeys, Three Cores- At the heart of the project is a single spiralling route that connects every gallery in the museum, walkable in either direction. Visitors who arrive at the top descend through ring-shaped galleries, moving from deep space and the ocean, down through Hainan’ s rainforests and tropical agriculture, and finally to a hands-on level for children. Those who enter at the ground floor walk the same path in reverse: from touch and play, expanding outward until the cosmos is overhead. Two directions, two readings of the same building. Subjects flow into one another rather than sit behind separate doors, and the order, by Ma Yansong’ s design, is the visitors to choose.
Structurally, the entire spiral is carried by three concrete core tubes. They eliminate columns from
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