Architectural Layout of Ningbo Museum of History

Ningbo Museum in the exterior design of a large number of the use of Ningbo's old city renovation in the accumulation of the old brick and tile, pottery, forming a 24-meter-high "valves wall", but also the use of the characteristics of the south of the Yangtze River bamboo made of special formwork of clear water concrete wall, bamboo randomly after the formation of cracking texture effect is clearly visible. Wang Shu talked about his design intention: "the use of 'valve wall', the use of a large number of recycled materials, saving resources, reflecting the cycle of construction of this traditional Chinese virtue, on the one hand, in addition to reflecting the traditional construction system of the Ningbo region, its texture and color fully integrated into the natural outside, the other significance lies in the The recycled old bricks and tiles, carrying hundreds of years of history, bear witness to the faded history, which is in line with the concept of the museum itself as a 'collection of history'. And 'bamboo formwork concrete' is a new creation, bamboo itself is a very characteristic plant in Jiangnan, which makes the original rigid concrete has undergone an artistic quality change."

The lower half of the building is a simple rectangle that cracks into a mountain-like shape in the upper half. One enters the museum through a flat, 30m-spanning piercing in the center. Inside, the entire structure consists of three valleys with large steps, two indoors and one outdoors; four caves, distributed at the entrance, the foyer, and the craggy sides of the outdoor valleys; and four pit-like courtyards, two in the center and two in the depths. A mountain typology is superimposed on it, and the public *** space is always multi-path, it starts at ground level and forks upwards to form a kind of rhizomatous labyrinthine structure. It is also used to accommodate the always uncertain content of the exhibition. The interior and exterior of the building are wrapped in bamboo formwork concrete and walls made of a mixture of more than 20 types of recycled old masonry, as a kind of grand frugal thing alive between the artificial and the natural, as the physicality of the mountain is the only thing it has to express. Its northern section is immersed in an artificially excavated pool, with earthen banks, planted with reeds, and the water has a walk, spilling over a stone dam at the entrance of the middle section and ending in a large pebbled beach. In the upper part of the building's cleavage hides an open terrace that looks out over the city and the distant rice paddies and mountains through four differently shaped fissures.

In February 2012, the Ningbo Museum of History was shortlisted in the Architecture category of the British Life Insurance Design Awards.