Long Museum West Bund by Atelier Deshaus

If anyone is searching for a healthy dose of brutality today, well you’ve just struck concrete! This béton beauty will have you appreciating, once again, why Kahn and Corbusier were the architectural monoliths of the twentieth century. Like a masonic ode to Kahn’s experiments with light and form, and Corb’s evocative use of concrete, Atelier Deshaus’s Long Museum West Bund stands as a four-storey testament to contemporary China’s increasing love-affair for all things art.

Founded by art collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, this museum houses an eclectic collection ranging from ancient Chinese ceramics to contemporary western painting and is primarily focused on encouraging greater public awareness and engagement with the broader art world. With a concert hall, a library, a cafe, a public courtyard, a children’s exhibition space, a river-view restaurant, artefact restoration rooms and 16,000m² of pure exhibition space heaven, this museum is attracting it’s fair share of public attention, artistic praise and crazy design love.

In terms of structural narrative, the museum is a stellar example of how to dramatically compose mass and void. Referring to the sites industrial past, the architecture frames a pretty awesome 1950’s coal-hopper bridge and directly grafts itself into a pre-existing basement car park using an industrial material palette. Above ground protrudes a highly composed framework of elegantly defined and uniquely structured umbrella vaults. This concrete canopy of vaulted profiles highlights the immensity yet lightness of the interior space and is finished off with some mighty fine detail joints. The whole thing is a sculpture in and of itself.

Punctured by strips of natural light, the vaulted framework caters for huge numbers of visitors by creating large open interiors and a free flowing floor plan. Keen to attract more and more attention, the museum features an eclectic array of national and international exhibitions all year round and is definitely worth the excitement and effort if you’re ever in Shanghai. As for the rest of us, our concrete imaginings of experiencing this space will have to suffice… well… for now at least.