In Haikou, MAD's founder creates a museum without columns that connects all galleries with one single spiral — and over 350,000 visitors have already walked it.

HAIKOU, CHINA — 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. Since its trial opening, it has welcomed more than 350,000 visitors in four months, with peak days drawing more than 5,800 people.

"I wanted the project to be built on the idea of flow and chaos — space, function, and knowledge to flow into one another, freely.” says 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."

On the frontline of China's space ambitions, a museum for the families next door

Hainan has quietly become part of China's scientific infrastructure. The country's only coastal spaceport sits on the island's east coast and has carried more than 40 launches since 2016, including missions to the Moon and Mars. The museum, named one of Hainan Province's "Top Ten Public Cultural Facilities," frames science not as a distant subject, but as something already happening in everyday life.

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.

A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself. Parents wait, students meet, residents pass through on the way home, and the lobby reads less like an atrium than a town square under a roof.

Architecture: One Spiral, Two Journeys, Three Cores

At the heart of the project is a single spiraling route that connects 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. Two directions, two readings of the same building. Subjects flow into one another rather than sit behind separate doors, and the order, by Ma Yansong's design, is the visitors to choose.

Circulation Diagram

Structurally, the entire spiral is carried by three concrete core tubes. They 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.

Photo of structure model

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? The Hainan Science Museum may be his clearest answer yet.

Part of a coastline Ma is still drawing

Together with MAD's earlier Cloudscape of Haikou, the small white reading pavilion that became a quiet phenomenon on the city's seafront, the Hainan Science Museum extends a sequence of public buildings westward along Haikou's coast.

Two projects, one architect, one coastline. For Ma Yansong, who has spent his career arguing that Chinese cities deserve emotional, even dreamlike public space, Haikou is becoming the clearest demonstration of that argument so far.

The Cloudscape of Haikou, photo by CreatAR Images

About Ma Yansong

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 (Hon. FAIA).

His built and ongoing work includes the Harbin Opera House, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Cloudscape of Haikou, the Quzhou Stadium and Sports Park, the Fenix in Rotterdam, and the Shenzhen Bay Culture Park.

Aerial view of Lucas Museum construction, September 2025. © 2025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Photo courtesy of Hathaway Dinwiddie. Photo by Pedro Ramirez. All rights reserved.

The Cloudscape of Haikou, photo by Aogvision

Quzhou Stadium, photoby CreatAR Images

Fenix, photo by ArchExist

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park

About MAD

Founded in 2004 by Ma Yansong and led by Ma Yansong, Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano, MAD is a global architecture practice with offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, and Rome. The studio is known for projects that integrate landscape, public space, and cultural narrative at all scales.

The Hainan Science Museum is now open to the public.

Ground Floor Plan

B1F Plan

2F Plan

5F Plan

Section

Hainan Science Museum

Haikou, Hainan Province, China

2019-2026

Gross Floor area: 46,528 sqm 

Above-ground GFA: 27,782 sqm

Below-ground GFA: 18,746 sqm

Principal Partners in Charge: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano

Associate in Charge: Fu Changrui, Kin Li, Tiffany Dahlen

Design Team: Wang Yiding, Chen Yiwen, Sun Feifei, Pan Siyi, Wang Shuang, Lyu Dechen, Yang Xuebing, Zhu Yuhao, Reem Mosleh, Alan Rodríguez Carrillo, Anri Gyuloyan, Rozita Kahirtseva, Zheng Chengwen, Wu Qiaoling, Feng Yingying, Edgar Navarrete 

Client: Haikou Association for Science and Technology

Project Management: Haikou Construction Engineering Group Co., Ltd.

Lead Architect: MAD

Executive Architect: CCDI Group

Supervising Consultant: Chongqing CCID

Engineering Consulting Co., Ltd.

Facade Consultant: RFR Shanghai

Landscape Consultant: EADG

Interior Design: MAD, CCDI Group

Lighting Consultant: Ning Field Lighting Design Corp., Ltd.

Signage Consultant: CCDI Group

Contractor: China Construction Eighth Engineering Bureau Co., Ltd.

Exhibition Design: Shanghai Kaiyi Architectural Design Co., Ltd.

Photography: Arch-Exist, LUO, Moden Wang, Yang Siyi

Model Photography: Tal+ Baiyu