The Hainan Science Museum, designed by Ma Yansong and his firm MAD, has opened to the public on the edge of Wuyuan River National Wetland Park in Hainan, China. Since its trial opening, the museum has welcomed more than 350,000 visitors over four months, with peak days drawing more than 5,800 people, said MAD.
A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself. With more than 30 schools and kindergartens within a three-kilometer radius, Ma conceived the building from the first sketch as civic infrastructure for the families around it, closer to a public library than a destination landmark.
At the heart of the project is a single spiraling route connecting every gallery in the museum, walkable in either direction. Visitors who arrive at the top descend through ring-shaped galleries, moving from deep space and the ocean, down through Hainan’s rainforests and tropical agriculture, and finally to a hands-on level for children. Those who enter at the ground floor walk the same path in reverse: from touch and play, expanding outward until the cosmos is overhead.
It is, in some ways, the question Ma Yansong has been circling for two decades: how does a building stop being a container for content and start being the content itself?
Subjects flow into one another rather than sit behind separate doors, and the order, by Ma’s design, is for the visitors to choose.
Structurally, the entire spiral is carried by three concrete core tubes that eliminate columns from the exhibition floors and lift the ring-shaped volume above an open ground level, allowing the building to float over its reflecting pools and the canopy beneath it. The exterior is wrapped in 843 fiber-reinforced polymer panels that form a silver shell shifting with daylight, sky, and weather.
The 46,528-square-meter complex also includes a planetarium, a giant-screen cinema, a sunken plaza, and shaded outdoor planting areas for hands-on plant and agriculture education, all connected by a covered walkway.
“I wanted the project to be built on the idea of flow and chaos — space, function, and knowledge to flow into one another, freely,” said Ma Yansong, Founder and Principal Partner of MAD.
“Different subjects should connect, overlap, and stay open. If artificial intelligence can already answer almost any question, a science museum’s job is no longer to deliver facts. It is to teach children how to ask them.”
Ma Yansong founded MAD in 2004. In 2025, he was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and served as curator of the China Pavilion at the 19th Venice International Architecture Biennale. In 2026, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Images: @archexist via MAD.
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