Chengdu Museum

SHH (then called Sutherland Hussey Architects) won the Chengdu Museum design competition with Pansolution, a young Chinese practice. The size of the museum holds symbolic value (the original brief was for 80,000m2), reflecting the city’s ambitions to build at a grand scale. The brief had no clear programme requirements; the client’s focus was visual impact and the creation of a landmark.  

In Chinese culture, the symbolic holds value not through literal visual representation but, as in the art of calligraphy, through more abstract and spiritual connections. A client is likely to give higher priority to the symbolic value of a building than to its programme. SHH’s response to this challenge was to introduce into the design a mask or veil, a translucent alloy mesh, as a reference to one of the museum’s most important local artefacts, a gold mask. The building’s ‘golden mask’ (in fact brass) wraps around the body of the museum and continues over the roof. 

The long narrow site is exploited using all the public areas to maximise a dramatic relationship with the new square. The remaining façades consequently enclose the largely hermetic exhibition halls; these are represented as a giant crafted artefact in the city cloaked in a precious skin of copper alloy rigorously profiled to play with light, shade and texture while accommodating all the technical requirements for ventilation grilles.  The form envelopes a new undercover outdoor public space – a monu­mental gateway through the building, offering a large outdoor public space.