Tunnel-boring machine will be the centerpiece of a planned 150,000-sf Metro Museum in Wuhan, China

Two 100-year-old German warehouses in Wuhan, China, central China’s most populous city, will be conjoined to create a 150,000-sf Metro Museum. The new building will use 75,000 sf of the site for the museum while 64,000 sf will be for commercial use, including restaurants, a café, and a gift shop.

One of the museums entrances will be underground inside the Line 7 Metro Station. Escalators will provide visitors entering via this entrance with views of each museum floor through incased glass as they ascend to the top of the four-level museum. The museum’s focal point is a tunnel-boring machine used to excavate metro tunnels. The boring machine extends two floors and is visible through floor-to-ceiling windows outside of the building. A circular ramp allows visitors to gain a close-up view of the parts and details of the machine.

A cross section of the new metro museum Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.

Once arriving at the fourth floor, guests will walk through a Visitor’s Center where they can explore the museum’s cabinet of curiosities (small collections of objects) as they descend an atria spiral staircase from the top floor to the ground floor. The ground level includes restaurants, a sculpture garden, and an auditorium.

“Our goal was to optimize the space to function as both a place of curiosity and socialization, with multiple revenue streams for the museum. Generating revenue beyond the admission fee is critical to the fiscal health of museums today,” says Rodney Abney, Principal of GreenbergFarrow, in a release.

The spiral staircase leading down from the fourth floor Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.

The new museum will become the largest and most comprehensive Metro Museum in China. It is expected to cost $40.8 million and open in September 2019.

The Metro Museum underground entrance Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.

A cafe connected to the new Metro Museum Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.

At an estimated budget of $1 billion, the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is considered the largest museum in the world dedicated to one civilization. The superlatives don’t end there: It’s also the largest museum in Egypt, the largest Pharaonic museum in the world, and one of the world’s leading scientific, historical, and archeological study centers.