China Wood Sculpture Museum by MAD Architects

Riccardo Bianchini, Inexhibit

The China Wood Sculpture Museum (中国木雕博物馆) in Harbin, the largest city of the Heilongjiang region in North-eastern China, is a museum dedicated to the wood sculpture and landscape painting typical of this area. The 13,000-square-meter museum, completed in 2013, is one of the most renowned buildings designed by the Chinese-American practice MAD Architects.

Taking inspiration from the shapes and spirit of nature, MAD designed an iconic building which forms resemble a driftwood corroded and carved by running water, like those can can be easily found on a river shore, thus connecting the architectural project both to the museum’s subject and to the landscape of the Heilongjiang, a cold-climate region of mountains and forests.

The appearance of this 200-meter-long building blurs the difference between liquid and solid, both because of its twisted organic shape and for its reflecting surface, clad in stainless steel tiles. Indeed, such envelope visually “dematerialize” the building, which size would have made it quite solid-looking otherwise, further emphasizing its dynamism and making it looks like a “solidified” stream of water.

The China Wood Sculpture Museum set itself apart from the surrounding urban landscape of Harbin, a city of more that five million inhabitants, establishing a conceptual link with nature, snow and ice as well as positively influencing the neighborhood development through a poetic, and visually groundbreaking, gesture.

As MAD usually do, the design has been quite attentive to sustainability, incorporating into the building a series of skylights to provide natural lighting to the three main exhibition halls of the museum; these openings have been set in accordance with the pleats and folds of the building’s skin, somehow devised as a logical consequence of its shape. At the same time, the reflective cladding, as well as a generous envelope insulation, provide the thermal performances required by the cold and humid local climate.

Project Data

Location : Harbin, China

Type: Museum

Time: 2009-2013

Site Area: 9,788sqm

Building Area: 12,959sqm

Building Length: 196m

Building Height: 21m

Project: MAD Architects; http://www.i-mad.com/

Team Directors: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun

Advisor: Bao Pao

Design Team: Yu Kui, Daniel Gillen, Bas van Wylick, Diego Perez, Jordan Kanter, Huang Wei, Julian Sattler, Liu Weiwei, Tang Liu, Mao Peihong, Maria Alejandra Obregon, Nickolas Urano, Gus Chan, Shin Park, Alejandro Gonzalez

Associate Engineer: The Architectural Design and ResearchInstitute of Harbin Institute of Technology

Curtain Wall Consultant: Inhabit Group

Panel Optimization: Gehry Technologies

Steel Structure Contractor: Zhejiang Jing Gong Steel Structure Co. Ltd.

Photos by Iwan Baan, Drawings by MAD Architects;

images courtesy of MAD Architects, all rights reserved