Spacing Out

When the Shanghai Astronomy Museum opened in China last summer, it transformed how visitors think about space—both outer space and the spaces we occupy here on Earth. It’s the largest astronomy museum in the world! The museum, shown above, occupies 420,000 square feet and includes a planetarium, an observatory, and a 78-foot-tall solar telescope. Ennead Architects used the cosmos as inspiration for the award-winning design. 

The architects included mostly organic, or curved, forms throughout the building. They used shape to capture a sense of orbital motion. As people walk around the museum, a giant, suspended sphere seems to emerge, like a planet on the horizon. The sphere houses the museum’s planetarium. In an immersive exhibit, visitors engage with monumental models of celestial bodies in our solar system. Lasers project images of stars onto the walls and animated images of Earth onto a rotating globe. Artifacts used for space exploration hang from the ceiling. From the museum’s top floor, viewers enter a curved glass structure, experiencing uninterrupted views of the sky.

The architects ensured that their designs remind visitors of the universe’s scale and shapes. Thomas Wong, one of the designers, says the museum is meant to “illuminate what it means to be human in a vast and largely unknown universe.”