Ordos Museum

The museum stands in a new city in the grasslands, a meeting point for a community working to interpret its traditions in a new urban setting. It was first imagined six years earlier, when the city government commissioned a museum for a metropolis that did not yet exist.

Amid the debate around the planned city, the museum had to navigate the contradictions between local culture and visions of the future. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan, the design team conceived a futuristic shell to protect the cultural history of the region and to stand apart from the rational grid outside. Wrapped in a sinuous metal skin, the museum rests on gentle slopes that recall the desert and have become a gathering place for local families.