MAD design the Pingtan Art Museum as an Artificial Island

In the last years, China has been used to be the source for some of the most inventive museums around. One of the recognized protagonists of such cultural flourishing is certainly the Chinese-American firm MAD, known for its Ordos museum in Mongolia and for having been recently appointed to design the new museum of narrative art George Lucas intends to create in Chicago.

Despite all we could have seen about new Chinese architecture, the Art Museum currently under construction on Pingtan Island, the Chinese land closest to Taiwan, is radically unconventional.

The Pingtan Art Museum is one of the cornerstones of a larger project, aimed to transform the island, one of the largest in China, in an innovative cultural, trade, and commercial link between Taiwan and the mainland.

The Pingtan Art Museum will become the largest private museum in China, a 430,000 square feet exhibition permanently displaying over 1,000 pieces to depict art and creativity in their various forms.

The museum conceived by MAD is a downsized replica of the Pingtan island itself: a small island attached, through an undulated pier, to a larger one attached in turn to the Asian continent through a five-kilometer-long bridge. Such a concept somehow resembles the outcome of a fractal recursion, expanded up to a landscape scale.

The building complex, located on a water basin at the heart of the city of Pingtan, has been shaped to mimic the hills and the profile of Pingtan island, its wavy, cavernous spaces will house, along with storage areas, offices and technical spaces, permanent and temporary exhibition galleries, art workshops, a restaurant, and a Zen tea room.

The museum building, scheduled for completion in 2016, adopts as its main construction material a mixture of concrete and local sand shells, ideally reconnecting it with the nature and the cultural background of the island, which once was traditionally inhabited by fishermen.

Images courtesy of MAD Architects