With over 30 schools and kindergartens within a three-kilometer radius, MAD conceived the building from the initial sketch as a civic infrastructure for local families. A wide canopy rises from the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and extending the public space under the building itself. The 46,528-square-meter complex includes a planetarium, a giant-screen cinema, a sunken plaza, and shaded outdoor growing areas for hands-on teaching about plants and agriculture, all connected by a covered walkway.
Hainan Science Museum by MAD. Photograph by Arch-Exist.
At the heart of the project is a unique spiral pathway connecting all the museum's galleries, accessible in both directions. Visitors arriving at the top descend through circular galleries, from deep space and the ocean, through rainforests and Hainan agriculture, to an interactive children's level. Those entering from the ground floor follow the same path in reverse: from touch and play, expanding outward until the cosmos unfolds around them. The themes flow into one another, and the order is chosen by the visitor.
Hainan Science Museum by MAD. Photograph by Arch-Exist.
Structurally, the entire spiral is supported by three central concrete tubes. These eliminate columns on the exhibition floors and elevate the circular volume above an open ground level, allowing the building to float above its reflecting pools and the green roof below. The exterior is clad with 843 fiber-reinforced polymer panels, forming a silvery shell that changes with the daylight, the sky, and the weather conditions.
In a way, this is the question Ma Yansong has been posing for two decades: how to make a building cease to be a mere container of content and become the content itself? The Hainan Science Museum might be his clearest answer.
Hainan Science Museum by MAD. Photograph by Arch-Exist.
Part of a waterfront that Ma is still designing
Together with MAD's earlier Cloudscape of Haikou, the small white reading pavilion that became a quiet phenomenon on the city's waterfront, the Hainan Science Museum extends a sequence of public buildings westward along the Haikou coast.
Two projects, one architect, one waterfront
For Ma Yansong, who has dedicated his career to advocating that Chinese cities deserve emotive, even dreamlike, public spaces, Haikou is becoming the clearest demonstration of this argument to date.
Hainan Science Museum by MAD. Photograph by Arch-Exist.
"I wanted the project to be based on the idea of fluidity and chaos: that space, function, and knowledge should flow freely into one another. Different disciplines should connect, overlap, and remain open. If artificial intelligence can already answer almost any question, the function of a science museum is no longer simply to transmit data, but to teach children how to formulate it."
Ma Yansong, Founder and Principal Partner of MAD.
