In China’s coastal city of Xiamen, the Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum by Atelier Alter Architects is a new museum added to an existing headquarter office that showcases a manufacturer’s collection of fossils, which include dinosaur eggs and insect amber.
Two key design challenges the architects tackled were firstly differentiating between a private office and public museum, and secondly drawing direct sunlight gained at the atrium space and distributing it into the building.
For the architects, the crystallized forms of the discovered fossils were instrumental in generating the architectural language of the museum space. Three intersecting crystalloids were introduced to the central atrium, their triangular volumes and heavy anti-gravity massing filling the massive space and creating a sci-fi-like feeling.
A quadrangular pyramid lightwell stretching from the building roof to the first-floor ceiling brings light into the first-floor museum atrium while the second-floor exhibition space and the rest of the office areas are lit by remaining portions of the building skylight as well as the reflected light that bounces of the tilted outer surface of the lightwell. Surrounding the vertical crystalloids are horizontal crystalloids that take the form of various fossil showrooms.
The final form is that of a penetrated Cartesian grid, an orthogonal system of columns and beams transformed into a mysterious triangulated space. Interior elements are minimal, the main material introduced being simple tiling. This simplicity aims to highlight the purity of the cave-like walls and the spatial, dimension and lighting concepts employed.
