Most museums are designed like very expensive shoeboxes. Art hates sunlight, so architects seal the walls, bolt on some skylights, and call it a day. Aedas went the other direction in Hangzhou and wrapped an entire museum in glass, then twisted it into two interlocking rings for good measure. The Yohoo Museum sits on an island in an artificial lake, glowing like a piece of polished jade, which is exactly the point. The shape is borrowed from the ritual jade rings of the Liangzhu culture, a Neolithic civilization that thrived in this part of China around 5,000 years ago.

Ken Wai, Global Design Principal at Aedas, led the design of the 57,650-square-foot (5,356-square-meter) building, completed in 2024 inside Liangzhu Yohoo Park (that’s Yohoo, not Yahoo the search engine. I know, I made that mistake too). The glass is a translucent multilayer laminate Aedas calls “emerald glass,” and it filters daylight into a soft, even wash across the galleries. A steel frame lets the ends of the rings lift off the ground with no visible support, creating covered plazas underneath. The project won Architectural Design of the Year and a Gold in the Cultural category at the International Design Awards, a juried global competition for built work.

Designers: Aedas, Ken Wai

Liangzhu jade comes in two signature shapes, the bi and the cong. The bi is a flat disc with a hole in the center, while the cong is a chunky tube that’s square outside and round inside. Later Chinese tradition read the bi as heaven and the cong as earth, and archaeologists say both starred in royal ceremonies honoring the sky. Each of the museum’s rings wraps around an open void, and Aedas frames these circular light wells as a link between heaven and earth. From above, the voids read like the drilled centers of two bi discs, and the squared-off island underneath does a decent cong impression if you squint.

Aedas says the two interlocking rings stand for two separate heritages, Liangzhu culture and the Grand Canal. The lake around the island connects to that canal, a roughly 1,100-mile (1,776-kilometer) waterway whose oldest sections date back more than 2,500 years. Hangzhou sits at its southern end, and the canal is largely what turned the city from a sleepy town into a booming trade hub. UNESCO listed the canal in 2014 and the Liangzhu ruins in 2019, so the building is basically two World Heritage sites holding hands. That’s a lot of symbolism for one roofline, but the form carries it so gracefully that I’m happy to play along.

A single steel frame carries the whole building, and Aedas used it to peel both ends up off the ground like the corner of a sticker. Those lifted edges overhang the entrances and shelter a pair of public plazas, which in the photos are getting plenty of use. One shot shows a school group picnicking under the curved soffit while two kids sprint past the camera, presumably fleeing a teacher. The underside is wrapped in smooth white panels, and beneath it a diamond grid of glass slopes down to meet the pavement. The result is a shaded waterfront room open to anyone, whether or not they ever step inside the galleries.

Up top, the galleries sit under a dense white steel diagrid, with translucent glass filling every gap in the structure. Interior photos show a bright, nearly shadowless hall where two visitors look like they’ve wandered into a cloud. The entrance volume uses greener, more jade-toned glass in horizontal bands, so the building’s color shifts depending on which face you’re looking at. American readers might recognize the strategy from Steven Holl’s Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, where translucent channel-glass volumes glow like lanterns. Aedas stretches the idea across a twisting, double-curved envelope, and the firm says parametric modeling kept that geometry efficient to build.

A white boardwalk zigzags across the lake to the museum, swelling into circular viewing pods that repeat the ring motif at walking scale. It’s a slow, wiggly approach, and it hands visitors plenty of different angles on the building before they arrive. A broader bridge links the island to the main park on the other side, where curving paths and a petal-shaped flower garden keep the theme going. Aerial shots also show the less poetic context, with apartment towers and older industrial blocks crowding the shoreline. That backdrop works in the museum’s favor, because a glowing glass knot reads even louder next to rows of identical high-rises.

Yuhang already has one famous lake-bound jade museum. David Chipperfield’s Liangzhu Museum opened in 2008 as four travertine bars set on a lake, linked to the park by bridges, with an exhibition island off to the south. Tadao Ando added a concrete cultural center nearby in 2016. Both architects treated Liangzhu’s heritage as something heavy and permanent, which makes sense for artifacts that spent 5,000 years underground. Aedas kept the same lake, island, and bridge recipe and swapped the stone for light. I keep wondering which version the original jade carvers would prefer, since their whole craft was coaxing a soft glow out of solid stone.

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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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