ARCHITECTURAL FOCUS
the exhibition floors and lift the ring-shaped volume above an open ground level, allowing the building to float over its reflecting pools and the canopy beneath it. The exterior is wrapped in 843 fiber-reinforced polymer panels that form a silver shell shifting with daylight, sky, and weather. The 46,528-square-meter complex also includes a planetarium, a giant-screen cinema, a sunken plaza, and shaded outdoor planting areas for hands-on plant and agriculture education all connected by a covered walkway. It is, in some ways, the question Ma Yansong has been circling for two decades: how does a building stop being a container for content and start being the content itself? The Hainan Science Museum may be his clearest answer yet.
Part of a coastline Ma is still drawing- Together with MAD’ s earlier Cloudscape of Haikou, the small white reading pavilion that became a quiet phenomenon on the city’ s seafront, the Hainan Science Museum extends a sequence of public buildings westward along Haikou’ s coast. Two projects, one architect, one coastline. For Ma Yansong, who has spent his career arguing that Chinese cities deserve emotional, even dreamlike public space, Haikou is becoming the clearest demonstration of that argument so far.
• Architects: MAD Architects
• Area: 46528 m ²
• Year: 2026
• Photographs: Arch-Exist, SheinAtlas, Moden Wang
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