Ordos Art & City Museum

In its recent years, the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, China, has gone through extensive restructuring of its urban panorama, transforming more and more areas of desert into modern and appealing urban landscapes.

Beijing-based MAD Architects have given their own contribution of an outstanding public building, the new Art and City Museum, completed this September after six years of construction. This amorphously shaped building serves as a platform for the local community to protect its historical culture and, at the same time, project it towards the outside metropolitan reality trough the futuristic dome.
The structure has been completed with polished aluminum panels arranged in a curved outline and completely lacking of windows, which results in a flowing, sinuous building whose bronze surface reflects the surroundings. This ultramodern shell encloses very generous spaces with disproportionate heights and hole-like passages between one room and the other, suggesting a similarity with the site’s desert history.

The tall white walls and ceilings with its numerous openings and rounded turns facilitate the natural ventilation of the environment, at the same time providing extremely bright and constant lighting of the rooms. No matter what exhibitions it is destined to hold, the flexibility of the Art and City Museum will undoubtedly achieve its purpose of connecting both past and future of the fast-pace changing city of Ordos.