a column-free museum at the edge of haikou

The Hainan Science Museum by MAD has opened in Haikou, China, where its silver, spiraling volume rises beside Wuyuan River National Wetland Park. With architecture led by Ma Yansong, the museum has already welcomed more than 350,000 visitors during its soft opening, with peak days drawing more than 5,800 people.

From above, the building reads as a compressed coil set between highway, city, and wetland. Its rounded shell-like facade appears to hover above the ground, with broad bands of metal catching the pale sky and softening the scale of the institution. The form gives the Hainan Science Museum a sense of movement before visitors step inside, as if the building has been shaped by rotation instead of stacked floor plates.

‘I wanted the project to be built on the idea of flow and chaos — space, function, and knowledge to flow into one another, freely,‘ Ma Yansong notes. ‘Different subjects should connect, overlap, and stay open.‘

images © Arch-Exist, unless otherwise stated

one spiral links the galleries

Inside, the team at MAD organizes the Hainan Science Museum around a single spiraling route that connects every gallery. Visitors can enter from the top and descend through ring-shaped exhibition spaces, moving from deep space and ocean themes toward Hainan’s rainforests, tropical agriculture, and hands-on children’s areas. Those beginning at the ground floor follow the same path upward, with tactile learning expanding toward the cosmos overhead.

This continuous circulation gives the museum its architectural logic. Science is presented through adjacency and movement, with subjects placed along a shared path instead of isolated rooms. The route turns learning into a physical sequence. Visitors see across voids, sense the next level above or below, and keep contact with the larger volume as they move through the exhibitions.

the Hainan Science Museum rises beside Wuyuan River National Wetland Park in Haikou

a column-free interior carried by three cores

The spiral is supported by three concrete core tubes, allowing the exhibition floors to remain free of columns. This structural decision gives the galleries an open, uninterrupted character, while allowing the ring-shaped museum to lift above the plaza and surrounding water. The building’s engineering serves the spatial idea directly: circulation, structure, and public ground work as a single system.

In the main hall, the effect is expansive and bright. White balconies curve around a central void, while daylight drops through the roof and washes across the upper levels. Suspended exhibition elements, including an astronaut and lunar form, draw attention upward, emphasizing the vertical movement built into the plan. The interior avoids the heavy feeling often associated with large museums, using the spiral to keep the space in motion.

a continuous spiral connects every gallery inside the museum

a metallic, shell-like facade

The exterior is wrapped in 843 fiber-reinforced polymer panels, forming a metallic skin that shifts with weather and daylight. In some views, the surface appears soft and clouded. In others, it reflects the tropical brightness of Haikou with a sharper sheen. Narrow horizontal openings cut into the shell, revealing bands of interior activity and giving the building scale against the skyline.

These openings also temper the mass of the museum. Seen close up, the Hainan Science Museum becomes a layered object, with rounded edges, recessed glazing, and deep shadows between its bands. The silver envelope gives the project a futuristic presence, but the detailing keeps attention on surface, thickness, and shadow. It feels crafted around movement, with each curve reinforcing the spiral inside.

the silver shell is formed from 843 fiber reinforced polymer panels

science as civic infrastructure

The Hainan Science Museum sits in a district with more than thirty schools and kindergartens within a two-mile radius, a context that shaped MAD’s approach to the project. In this setting, the museum works as a public learning building for families and students nearby, with a planetarium, giant-screen cinema, sunken plaza, and shaded outdoor planting areas extending the program beyond conventional exhibition space.

MAD’s design places that educational ambition inside a building that visitors understand through their bodies. They walk the spiral, cross the shaded ground, look upward through the central void, and read the exterior as a continuous shell. For the Hainan Science Museum, architecture becomes part of the lesson: knowledge moves through space, and the museum gives that movement a visible form.

three concrete cores keep the exhibition floors free of columns