Architecture style
In 2023, the Yuz Museum Shanghai moved from its original venue on the West Bund to Panlong Ancient Town.
The museum’s former venue was built inside a 9,000-square-meter aircraft hanger on the previous site of Longhua Airport. It was designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who designed London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion and won the Marcus Prize for Architecture in 2013.
Utterly different to its previous image, the new Yuz Museum Shanghai in Panlong Ancient Town, renders a fresh new look to the public.
Residing by the river, the museum conjures up scenery that bridges tradition and modernity, nature and history.
Chinese architect Zhu Xiaofeng and his team referred a lot to the traditional residential houses of Jiangnan in their design.
The design employs the two basic structural forms of “mountain wall” (ኡ ້) and “double-slope roof” (ৼඑ亦), often seen in the traditional residential houses in Jiangnan, or lower parts of the south Yangtze River.
The mountain wall is divided in half, which becomes the semi-support structure of the building. The double-slope roof is transformed into a reverse inward slope, which becomes the outward “double flying eaves.”
The fusion of the old and the new and the interweaving of the internal and the external maintain a direct relationship with the traditional structure, while at the same time forming a basic language of the entire architectural settlement.
Passing through the west side corridor and the courtyard at the entrance, visitors enter the museum via a river corridor to the north.
The 440-square-meter square exhibition hall to the south of the foyer, with four interlocking steel beams supporting the roof, gives a large column-free space with a common structural section. Natural light is filtered from the skylight and through the light film at the top, providing a soft and cohesive lighting in the exhibition hall.
On the west of the foyer lies a 100square-meter small exhibition hall with a view of outdoor scenes with rice paddies and lotus ponds.
The museum takes the foyer as its core, establishing a richly layered spatial and temporal experience among the atrium, exhibition halls, café, veranda, rice paddies and the waterfront.