Hainan Science Museum
HAINAN SCIENCE MUSEUM
MAD Architects
ARCHITECTS
MAD Architects
EXECUTIVE ARCHITECT
Ccdi Group
INTERIOR DESIGN TEAM
Mad, Ccdi Group
LIGHTING CONSULTANTS
Ning Field Lighting Design Corp., LTD.
PRINCIPAL PARTNERS IN CHARGE
Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
MAIN CONTRACTOR
China Construction Eighth Engineering Bureau Co., LTD.
SIGNAGE CONSULTANT
Ccdi
EXHIBITION DESIGN
Shanghai Kaiyi Architectural Design Co., LTD.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Haikou Construction Engineering Group Co., LTD.
ASSOCIATE IN CHARGE
Fu Changrui, Kin Li, Tiffany Dahlen
LANDSCAPE CONSULTANT
Eadg
CLIENT
Haikou Association For Science And Technology
FACADE CONSULTANT
Rfr Shanghai
DESIGN TEAM
Wang Yiding, Chen Yiwen, Sun Feifei, Pan Siyi, Wang Shuang, Lyu Dechen, Yang Xuebing, Zhu Yuhao, Reem Mosleh, Alan Rodríguez Carrillo, Anri Gyuloyan, Rozita Kahirtseva, Zheng Chengwen, Wu Qiaoling, Feng Yingying, Edgar Navarrete
PHOTOGRAPHS
Arch-Exist, SheinAtlas, Moden Wang
AREA
46528 m²
YEAR
2026
LOCATION
Haikou, China
CATEGORY
Museums & Exhibit
English description provided by the architects.
The Hainan Science Museum, designed by Ma Yansong and his firm MAD, has opened to the public on the edge of Wuyuan River National Wetland Park.
Since its trial opening, it has welcomed more than 350,000 visitors in four months, with peak days drawing more than 5,800 people.
"I wanted the project to be built on the idea of flow and chaos — space, function, and knowledge to flow into one another, freely." says Ma Yansong, Founder and Principal Partner of MAD.
"Different subjects should connect, overlap, and stay open. If artificial intelligence can already answer almost any question, a science museum's job is no longer to deliver facts. It is to teach children how to ask them."
ON THE FRONTLINE OF CHINA'S SPACE AMBITIONS, A MUSEUM FOR THE FAMILIES NEXT DOOR
Hainan has quietly become part of China's scientific infrastructure.
The country's only coastal spaceport sits on the island's east coast and has carried more than 40 launches since 2016, including missions to the Moon and Mars.
The museum, named one of Hainan Province's "Top Ten Public Cultural Facilities," frames science not as a distant subject, but as something already happening in everyday life.
With more than 30 schools and kindergartens within a three-kilometer radius, Ma conceived the building from the first sketch as civic infrastructure for the families around it, closer to a public library than a destination landmark.
A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself.
Parents wait, students meet, residents pass through on the way home, and the lobby reads less like an atrium than a town square under a roof.
ARCHITECTURE: ONE SPIRAL, TWO JOURNEYS, THREE CORES
At the heart of the project is a single spiralling route that connects every gallery in the museum, walkable in either direction.
Visitors who arrive at the top descend through ring-shaped galleries, moving from deep space and the ocean, down through Hainan's rainforests and tropical agriculture, and finally to a hands-on level for children.
Those who enter at the ground floor walk the same path in reverse: from touch and play, expanding outward until the cosmos is overhead.
Two directions, two readings of the same building. Subjects flow into one another rather than sit behind separate doors, and the order, by Ma Yansong's design, is the visitors to choose.
Structurally, the entire spiral is carried by three concrete core tubes. They eliminate columns from the exhibition floors and lift the ring-shaped volume above an open ground level, allowing the building to float over its reflecting pools and the canopy beneath it.
The exterior is wrapped in 843 fiber-reinforced polymer panels that form a silver shell shifting with daylight, sky, and weather.
The 46,528-square-meter complex also includes a planetarium, a giant-screen cinema, a sunken plaza, and shaded outdoor planting areas for hands-on plant and agriculture education all connected by a covered walkway.
It is, in some ways, the question Ma Yansong has been circling for two decades: how does a building stop being a container for content and start being the content itself? The Hainan Science Museum may be his clearest answer yet.
PART OF A COASTLINE MA IS STILL DRAWING
Together with MAD's earlier Cloudscape of Haikou, the small white reading pavilion that became a quiet phenomenon on the city's seafront, the Hainan Science Museum extends a sequence of public buildings westward along Haikou's coast.
Two projects, one architect, one coastline. For Ma Yansong, who has spent his career arguing that Chinese cities deserve emotional, even dreamlike public space, Haikou is becoming the clearest demonstration of that argument so far.
