The reduced rigid masterplan of Ningbo‘s Eastern New City Centre served as a model for the design of the city‘s museum of technology. Framed on three sides by straight canals and accesses from East Zhongshan Road to the south, it is a sharp-edged volume. The parking lots and the entrance to the underground garage were placed along the street so that, except for delivery vans, cars do not spoil the view of the landscaped grounds.

Apart from the building design, the modelling of the landscape gardens also responds to the masterplan. lt is an attempt to combine picturesque parkland qualities with the strict orthogonality of the urban map and the austerity of the building. The façade structure of the museum cube follows the interior organization. The two main exhibition floors (which include the cinemas) rest on a two-storey ‘plinth‘. The third, attic, level contains administration offices and lecture halls, which enclose a roof terrace.

All the halls, laboratories, offices, cinemas and other auditoria are grouped around the central circular entrance hall which serves as the hub of the main interior thoroughfares‘ to the north and south, east and west entrances/exits. These corridors are three storeys high and criss-crossed at different levels by ramps and bridges.

A spherical gallery with a diameter of 42 m is suspended in the entrance hall. lt is a ‘quote‘ from Boullée‘s cenotaph for Isaac Newton, embedded in the complex as if it were its nucleus. The upper half of the sphere, which is also the domed roof of the entrance hall, unfolds its long-distance effect especially at night. Flights of stairs, ramps and escalators link the entrance hall with the spherical space and the exhibition levels.

Technological museum, Ningbo, China
Competition: 2004
Use: Museum