Hua Art Museum

This guide to the Hua Art Museum in Shenzhen starts with an unglamorous job: in the early 1980s this squat warehouse ran the laundry for the Shenzhen Bay Hotel, washing sheets while the city outside was still being built. It follows the choice architects from the Shenzhen firm Urbanus made in 2006, when they left the old box standing and wrapped it in a curtain of glass hexagons that reach through the walls to reshape the rooms inside, carving out one gallery lined in warm timber and another in raw poured concrete. The museum opened in September 2008, inside the OCT-Loft creative district built from the shells of Shenzhen's industrial past.