A column in the middle of a music hall means someone has to look around it. That’s a practical problem to solve before worrying about how dramatic the ceiling looks. At the Maestro Ilaiyaraaja Centre for Music Learning and Research in Chennai, India, Ekarth Studio uses bamboo vaults to create spans of up to 49 feet without interior columns. The structure makes room for people to gather, while giving them a roof worth looking up at.

The completed, 10,000-square-foot center at IIT Madras addresses another challenge: bringing music education, research, rehearsal, and recording into one setting. Named for composer Ilaiyaraaja, it belongs to the university’s “Music for All” initiative, whose research interests include acoustics, artificial intelligence, sound synthesis, and instrument design. That’s an unusually broad assignment for a music building. It needs places for focused work, but also room for different disciplines to meet without every encounter becoming a scheduled appointment.

Designer: Ekarth Studio

The roofs give those activities a recognizable home. Ekarth Studio drew their geometry from Bel Patra, the three-part leaf associated with Lord Shiva. Interconnected vaults translate that reference into canopies that rise, dip, and extend over the spaces below. I like that the inspiration has a specific cultural origin. A music center with a curving roof could easily attract a vague explanation about sound waves, but this one has a more deliberate starting point.

Those curves also involve some serious assembly. The studio describes a structural system combining round bamboo culms, bundled splits, and bundled sticks. Flat bamboo splits are gathered together to form the primary spine beams, rather than relying on a single solid member. Arches reach nearly 30 feet high. The useful distinction is that bamboo carries the roof and establishes its shape. Calling it a decorative finish would miss the most interesting decision in the project.

Leaving that construction exposed gives the interiors their character. Ekarth’s material palette includes treated bamboo, lime-based finishes, earthen surfaces, natural-fiber roofing, and handcrafted bamboo weaving. The studio also leaves the bamboo’s connections visible. I’m drawn to buildings that let you follow how they were assembled. Here, the repetition of individual pieces gives the large roof forms a finer scale, so the architecture offers more to examine than its outline from a distance.

The exterior photographs show roof edges sweeping outward above bamboo lattice screens, with trees close to the pavilions. The small, regular openings in those screens contrast with the broad curves overhead. They make the enclosure look less abrupt than a blank wall would. Ekarth’s plan connects classrooms and other spaces with courtyards and shaded outdoor areas, giving the center an architectural relationship with its surroundings that goes beyond putting landscaping around a finished building.

The people who assembled it deserve attention, too. According to the studio’s account, artisans split, bent, bundled, and joined the bamboo primarily with basic carpentry tools, while structural engineering adapted those processes for an institutional building. Ekarth reports an 11-month construction period with limited use of heavy machinery. That timeline is noteworthy, but I’d give equal billing to the craft. Its contribution remains legible in the finished architecture rather than disappearing behind another surface.

A beautiful bamboo structure doesn’t, by itself, establish how well a recording room isolates sound or how comfortable the building stays throughout the year. Those are separate performance questions, and the published project descriptions don’t provide measurements that settle them. The same restraint applies to sustainability. Natural materials and a less machinery-intensive construction process are choices worth discussing, but they aren’t enough to calculate the building’s environmental footprint or long-term maintenance demands.

Even with those questions open, the design gives me a clear reason to pay attention. The central amphitheater-like gathering space puts rehearsal, performance, and collective learning beneath the same expressive structure. That feels like an appropriate investment for a music center: a memorable room whose defining gesture also keeps its floor open. The ceiling earns its visual complexity by leaving more usable space underneath, where the people and the music belong.

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Most natural history museums look like banks. Big stone steps, columns out front, and a lobby so grand you feel underdressed for a trip to see a stuffed moose. 3XN’s Shenzhen Natural History Museum looks like a piece of riverbank that wandered into town and decided to stay. Its curving walls bend and loop like a river cutting oxbows across a floodplain, with gardens planted on top where the water should be. It’s easily the friendliest-looking museum I’ve seen in a while, and I mean that as a huge compliment.

The museum opened on July 28, 2026, beside Yanzi Lake in Shenzhen’s Pingshan District, six years after we first saw it as a set of competition renders. Danish studio 3XN led the design alongside B+H Architects and local firm Zhubo Design, calling the scheme Delta after the river landscapes that inspired it. It covers roughly 1.13 million square feet (105,300 square meters), making it South China’s largest natural history museum. The roof is a public park you can stroll across without a ticket, and the galleries sit inside five enormous cones. One of those interior spaces holds a spiral staircase so swoopy it could pass for a Frank Gehry sketch.

Designer: 3XN, B+H Architects & Zhubo Design

Seen from above, the building is pure river doodle. Its walls swing out in long, lazy bends and then curl back in, leaving crescents of lawn and trees tucked inside each loop like oxbow lakes that dried up and became parks. Five rounded volumes sit along the curve, a bit like smooth stones the current forgot to carry away. Paths trace the tops of the walls the way a riverside trail follows the water. The footprint was drawn from the bends of the nearby Pingshan River, so the building is basically doing an impression of its neighbor.

The walls are built from vertical fins of Shandong granite, packed so tightly they read like rock that rain has been scratching at for a few thousand years. Those fins shade the galleries while still letting daylight slip through, which counts for a lot in Shenzhen’s subtropical heat. At sunset the stone turns warm and peachy, and every ridge throws a thin stripe of shadow down the curve. Most of the panels are standardized, so a damaged one can be swapped out without anyone noticing. The overall effect is a cliff face, which feels about right for a building that stores fossils for a living.

Cut into that stone are wide arched openings that look like the mouths of sea caves. The main one sits on the south side, linking the busy street to the wetland park behind the museum, so the front door doubles as a shortcut into nature. Reflecting pools stretch out in front, giving the arches mirrored twins in the water. Walking in should feel like ducking under a rock overhang on a hike, minus the risk of bumping your head. 3XN describes these openings as fissures in the cliff, a fancy geology word for a crack that happens to look cool.

Inside, the gray granite gives way to golden marble. Each of the five cones is wrapped in wood-grain marble from Guangxi, with stripes that look like layers of sediment or, if you’re hungry, a really nice slice of tiramisu. Between the cones, a central atrium rises toward a big rooflight, and a staircase spirals up around the core in wavy, uneven rings. This is the Gehry moment, all ripples and swoops, like the Guggenheim’s spiral after a double espresso. The architects named the atrium the Tree of Life, and the stair really does seem to grow upward, branching off onto each floor.

The roof slopes up from the ground like a grassy hill, so getting onto it feels about as formal as climbing a park mound. It’s split into five garden zones, from succulents and tropical plants to species pulled from Chinese literature, which is a very poetic way to sort a lawn. At its tallest the building reaches 118 feet (36 meters), but about half of it stays low to match the school and convention center next door. That keeps the mountain views to the north open for everyone, rooftop picnickers included. The roof is also set up for nighttime stargazing, which might be the best use of a museum ceiling yet.

Shenzhen has a reputation for building fast and building big, and plenty of its megaprojects shout to get noticed. This one speaks in curves, warm stone, and a whole lot of grass, which makes a 1.13-million-square-foot building feel oddly approachable. It also suits the job, since the exhibits inside trace how water, rock, and time shaped everything on the planet. The architecture tells that same story from the outside before you read a single label. I’d bet plenty of kids leave remembering the dinosaurs, and just as many remember the afternoon they rolled down the museum.

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