As the world’s largest astronomy museum was unveiled to the public in Shanghai, China, its designers are eager to tell the story behind the museum’s marvelous architecture. Ennead Architects, the designer of the Shanghai Astronomy Museum, aimed for a dynamic form that represented the movement of planets and stars in the skies.
“In making this building, we wanted to create a place where the institutional mission is fully enmeshed with an architecture that itself is teaching, and finds form in some of the fundamental principles that shape our universe,” said Thomas J. Wong of Ennead Architects. “The big idea of the Shanghai Astronomy Museum was to infuse a visceral experience of the subject matter into the design and to deliver that before you even enter the building, and at the end of your visit, there is this culminating moment directly with the sky, which is framed and supported by the architecture,” he added.
Composed of 420,000 square feet of space, the museum includes a planetarium, general exhibition space, and a groundbreaking solar telescope that measures 78 feet tall.
Visitors experience the museum by progressing through three parts of the building. First, they see a large oculus high above the main entrance. Sunlight enters through the opening of the oculus and slowly moves across the entryway as the sun changes its position in the sky throughout the day. Next, in the second part of the museum, the planetarium theater, visitors see a futuristic sphere that resembles a planet floating in space. From afar, the sphere is a dramatic icon for the museum. The last and final feature is an inverted dome that gives visitors a breathtaking view of the sky above.
Image: Ennead Architects and Arch-Exist
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