The Huafa Art Museum is designed to serve as a platform for overlooking the city of Macau and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao ocean bridge.  The museum gives visible form to the corridor of modern cultural exchange between China and the West. The form of the building appears to be composed of free curves but is actually a set of hyperbolic surfaces that relate to one another precisely in a highly unusual and distinctive way, allowing the form to be built as a composite of flat parts that altogether create the appearance of continuous motion.

The building marks the beginning of the famous pedestrian and bike path, “Lover Road”. The site is not only exceptional for its location but also for its shape, a parallelogram. The museum is coordinated with the three story underground parking lot, previously designed for the site.

The museum is organized around an iconic interior space in which a ramp spirals around an atrium and returns to the ground level by sloping in the opposite direction. 

The ground level includes the lobby, the atrium, ticketing, bookstore and the entrance to the theater; one half level up is the large museum gallery, the art gallery, the main terrace overlooking the waterfront, the bar, and the art store; level 2 includes galleries and the theater; level 3 includes offices and education spaces; level 4 includes the restaurant, the south terrace overlooking Macau and the artist studios with the northwest corner terrace.

The supplementary façade roof forms are composed of straight lines which allow the use of standard steel trusses and structural ribs. Thus, though the building appears to curve, none of its structural members are required to be curved. The geometry allows the structure to be cost effective. 


Size: 25,000 M2

Schedule: Finalist, international competition, 2013

Design team: Preston Scott Cohen, Carl Dworkin, Collin Gardner, Paul Dahlke, Yi Xiao