Nanjing Museum in collaboration with Joseph Istance and Leo Liu

Location : Nanjing

Sector : Competition / Museum

Area : 550 m2

Status : Competition

The project is organised around a new horizontal platform that caps the existing reservoir, functioning as both a garden floor above and a museum ceiling below. Four freestanding corner pavilions anchor the platform within the landscape and provide flexible GFA. With glazed interiors and gabion-like walls filled with excavated earth and artefacts, they act as living repositories of Nanjing’s geological and cultural history. Additionally, at night, the gabion walls become softly illuminated; light filters through the gaps between the stacked rocks, cracking through the negative space and transforming the pavilions into glowing lanterns within the landscape.

Visitors move between above and below, inside and outside, while light, water, and air are drawn down into the subterranean museum through rooflights and openings in the plane.