Location: Shanghai, China.

Architect: David Chipperfield Architects.

The West Bund Museum is a new art gallery located on the Shanghai Corniche, which is an 8.5-kilometer frontage on the northern bank of the Huangpu River. The museum is part of the West Bund Masterplan, which aims to create a new cultural district over nine square kilometers of former industrial land. The museum occupies a triangular plot at the northernmost tip of a new public park, and its location allows for improved access to both the river and the park. The building consists of three main gallery volumes placed in a pin-wheel formation around a central lobby with a double-height atrium. The pin-wheel configuration of the galleries is reinforced with large windows at their outer ends offering panoramic views over the park, the river, and the city. The Centre Pompidou Paris and the publicly owned West Bund Group have agreed on a contract establishing a cultural partnership. In the five years following the opening, the Centre Pompidou is showing a number of exhibitions in the new museum as part of a cultural collaboration between France and China. The Shanghai West Bund project aims to create a waterfront worthy of a global metropolis. With a shoreline of 11.4 kilometers, the West Bund area covers 9.4 square kilometers. Following a culture-oriented development principle, more than 20 cultural and art institutions have gathered along the uninterrupted shoreline of the West Bund, forming one of Asia’s foremost cultural districts by the end of 2020.

Photo credit: Simon Menges.