China Design Museum

Hangzhou, China

2014~2018

Commissioned by the China Academy of Art and completed in 2018, the China Design Museum was conceived to house a 7,000-piece Bauhaus collection acquired from German collector Torsten Bröhan in 2011. Siza's design responds directly to the triangular site at the intersection of two major roads on the Xiangshan Campus, organizing the 16,000-square-meter building around a central open-air courtyard. The triangular plan is not a formal gesture but a pragmatic response to site constraints, creating a continuous circulation loop that guides visitors through the permanent Bauhaus exhibition on the top floor and temporary galleries below. The exterior is clad in red Agra sandstone imported from India, contrasted with white marble insets—a material palette that references both modernist abstraction and traditional Chinese architectural polychromy. The building embodies Siza's late-career synthesis: rigorous geometric discipline serving programmatic clarity, where form emerges from site logic rather than imposed symbolism.