Runaway volumes and screen-like facades: Snøhetta’s rule-breaking museum in Beijing

Another element is added to the ever-changing metropolitan mosaic of Beijing, and it is Snøhetta that inserts it. The Norwegian firm, together with the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD), won the competition to design the Beijing Art Museum in Tongzhou, the historic eastern gateway to the capital, recently enhanced in its cultural appeal thanks to the opening of the Performing Arts Centre designed by Pekins&Will (2023) and the Beijing Library (2023), also designed by Snøhetta. With an area of over 110,000 square metres, the new museum will house a wide range of art forms (from fine arts to contemporary art and fashion), aiming to become a cultural and civic hub capable of stimulating new energy in the district's urban development process. As often happens in Snøhetta's works, such a clear and simple layout is matched by equally spectacular architecture. The imposing sculptural mass consists of a semi-open central core that serves as a multifunctional space and distribution hub for the entire complex, around which “box-like” volumes of different sizes and dimensions are arranged radially, as if driven by an endogenous outward thrust, housing exhibition galleries, storage areas and additional functions. 

On the fronts of the protruding volumes, large undulating windows placed like multiple screens towards the surroundings blur the boundaries between inside and outside and play on the perceptual dualism of observing and being observed. The centrifugal tension ruling the composition goes beyond formal exercise and becomes a semantic tool, suggesting an idea of culture that transcends the (sometimes narrow) boundaries of museum display cases and opens to the city, first and foremost as a device for inclusion and aggregation. This assumption is also evident in landscape design: not only a “backdrop” framed by glass windows, but also and above all an organic extension of the architecture, culminating outdoors in generous public spaces dotted with sculptures and ready to host temporary exhibitions, events and community initiatives.