Type 7 | Zaishui Art Museum

Zaishui Art Museum

Photographer: Arch-Exist⁠

This art museum in china stretching across a lake is like no work of architecture we’ve ever seen.

“Everything feels in some way defensive,” architect Junya Ishigami says of the process of building anything in China, with its monumentally “vast, boundless landscapes.”

His answer? Go big. The recently-completed Zaishui Art Museum you see above stretches over 1 kilometre across the water near the coastal city of Rizhao. As Ishigami sees it, this is the best way to treat the environment and a building as an equal, blurring the boundaries between what is man-made and what isn’t.

Along the meandering structure, the walkway casts a serpentine shape with the lake water seemingly coming into the space itself, allowed through small channels that will regulate the internal water levels.

There are no grand atriums - instead, the ceiling actually comes almost to head height in certain parts. The avant-garde architecture doesn’t just end at the location however, as the museum was designed so that visitors are expected to walk the full length and back on their visit.