West Lake Museum
Lakeside museum whose galleries sit almost entirely underground, lit by skylights beneath a grass roof.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the West Lake Museum in Hangzhou explains why, on some of the most painted shoreline in China, planners chose to bury most of China's first lake-dedicated museum underground when it opened in 2005. It traces the architects' decision to protect the willow-lined view above ground while carving galleries and storage vaults into the earth below. You'll hear how they solved the problem of lighting rooms with no windows, funneling daylight down through skylights cut into a roof of open lawn. Stand on the grass overhead and picture the collection resting beneath your feet.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
浙江大學藝術與考古博物館
Concrete-block museum whose galleries stay on one level, with academic wings stacked above in glass and steel.
Exhibition Hall of Southern Song Site
Glass-floored gallery over an excavated Song Dynasty imperial road, its stone paving stacked beneath centuries of later streets.
Wuzhen Scenic Area
Water town whose lakeside museum holds the smuggled prison notebooks of a Cultural Revolution-era painter and writer.
Orioles Singing in the Willows
Willow-fringed lakeside park built on a Southern Song imperial garden, later a Muslim graveyard rediscovered under the mud.
Zhejiang Museum of Natural History
Dinosaur fossils and natural specimens rooted in a nineteen twenty-nine worlds fair.
China Academy of Art Xiangshan Central Campus
Campus of reclaimed roof tiles and bricks assembled by traditional craftsmen into experimental load-bearing walls.