Ma Yansong’s new museum is a 21st-century Guggenheim

Designed by Ma Yansong, Domus’s guest editor for 2026, the new Haikou Science Museum is situated on Hainan Island, on the edge of the Wuyuan River Wetland National Park. Set amidst tropical beaches and one of China’s most advanced spaceports, the complex is located in an area where nature, scientific infrastructure and technological development coexist. Spanning over 46,000 square metres, the building comprises exhibition galleries, a planetarium, a cinema, and outdoor spaces dedicated to educational and community activities, establishing itself as a new cultural and civic hub for the area.

The aim of the project was, on the one hand, to help strengthen the area’s scientific and cultural identity and, on the other, to offer the community not merely a museum facility, but a civic space capable of encouraging exploration, experience and curiosity, in favour of a more direct, daily and informal approach to science. The monolithic, sinuous structure unfolds in a spiral pattern, gradually expanding upwards and rising from a base platform that shelters a wide public square below.

 "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".

Externally, the cladding of fibre-reinforced polymer panels forms a silvery shell that shimmers according to the light and weather conditions. Internally, the structure is supported by three central columns, freeing the spaces from intermediate supports and accentuating the sense of fluid dynamism. The conceptual heart of the project is the continuous spiral path, freely percorrable in both directions, which takes visitors from the cosmos to the ocean depths, from rainforests to tropical agriculture (and vice versa), through interactive galleries, immersive settings, educational spaces and areas for play. A swirling path which, as in the FENIX Museum of Migration, evokes cthe complexity of natural flows, cosmic trajectories and turbulent terrestrial dynamics. A deeply organic work that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum in New York, from which Ma Yansong draws inspiration for the spiral-shaped spatial layout organised around the central void, whilst pushing its symbolic meaning to the extreme: whereas in New York the visitor route is predominantly downward, in Haikou the flows intertwine without a  predetermined direction of movement, emphasising the need for exploratory freedom and surprise in the often complex journey towards knowledge. Perhaps, this is to demonstrate how, to understand complexity, it is necessary to be part of it.