Ningbo Historic Museum-Iwan Baan Photos

The Ningbo Historic Museum sit on a massive unpopulated plaza in Yinzhou, a district in the city of Ningbo. The museum, three-story, 30'000-square-metre block positioned on the plaza's northwestern edge.
On approach, its form looks strange. It is apparently a box. Its materials seems to be inconsistent and ill-fitting. The facade is pocked with small windows that reveal nothing of the building's content. Near the museum, the walls reveal the presence of over 20 different types of recycled tiles and bricks collected from destruction sites around the region. In the design Wang Shu has interpreted the idea of the mountain by widening the range of entrances and treating the space inside as if it were a kind of maze.

Wang Shu, the architects, explains: "When I designed this, I was thinking of mountains.I couldn't design something for the city, because here is no city here yet, so I wanted to do something that had life. Finally I decided to design a mountain."