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.
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.
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.
Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.
Rendering courtesy of GreenbergFarrow.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
The Art of Reconstruction
The Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., completed in 1867, houses two Smithsonian Institution museums—the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Collections include portraits of all U.S. presidents, along with paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings of numerous historic figures from American history, and the works of more than 7,000 American artists.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Please Touch Museum at Memorial Hall Philadelphia, Pa.
Built in 1875 to serve as the art gallery for the Centennial International Exhibition in Fairmount Park, Memorial Hall stands as one of the great civic structures in Philadelphia. The neoclassical building, designed by Fairmount Park Commission engineer Hermann J. Schwarzmann, was one of the first buildings in America to be designed according to the principles of the Beaux Arts movement.
