Location: Wuzhen, China.

Architect: OLI Architecture.

The Mu Xin Art Museum is a 7,000m2 museum located in the historic water town of Wuzhen in northern Zhejiang Province. The museum is dedicated to the renowned artist, writer, poet, and scholar Mu Xin, who was deeply impacted by his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution and his ultimate exile to the West. The building is inspired by the complexity of Mu Xin’s work and writing, which reflect the mental expansion of the mind within physical constraints. The museum is a landscape of intersecting experiences, with cast-in-place colored concrete volumes in varying sectional relationships to the canal and street. The visitor experiences an expansion of space not only in the physical realm but also as a bridge into the complex world of Mu Xin. The museum has won several awards, including the 2016 AIANYS Award of Merit, the 2016 German Design Council Iconic Award Best of Best, and the 2015 Concrete Industry Board Roger H. Corbetta Award of Merit, Out of Country. The museum was designed and constructed between 2011 and 2015 and covers an area of 6,700 m2.

Photo credit: OLI Architecture.