By Daniel Elsea
The People’s Revolutionary Museum and the Chinese National History Museum, which both occupy a vast Stalinist building on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, will soon merge into a single National Museum of China. The new museum will remain in the same home, but von Gerkan, Marg und Partner (GMP) from Hamburg, Germany, will design a comprehensive renovation, heralding a reinvented institution.
GMP’s design is a careful study in deference to context. It preserves the building’s eastern facade (which faces Tiananmen), and the northern and southern wings, which are built in the Socialist Realist style typical of grand, civic projects of 1950s China. These spaces will house the bulk of the museum’s galleries and will undergo refurbishment.
The existing core will be replaced with a large public space crowned by a large cantilevered roof that contains exhibition spaces punctured by an intricate series of rectangular openings, evoking the hutong layout of old Beijing. Access for passers-by will be allowed in the area below, creating an interior public plaza.
The large addition alludes to traditional Chinese temple architecture, found in the Forbidden City, opposite the museum on the northern side of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. In addition, it brings the museum to the height of the Great Hall of the People, which faces it from across the square.
GMP was awarded the project after an international competition including Foster & Partners, Herzog & de Mureon, the Cox Group, OMA, RTKL and KPF.
“Our design was focused more than the others on Tiananmen Square,” says GMP's Stephan Rewolle. “We did something that comes natural [for the setting].”
Groundbreaking is expected at the end of 2005 with completion in time for the 2008 Olympic Games. In addition to the museum, GMP is designing a number of mixed-use developments in Beijing, Dalian, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, as well as a stadium in Fushan, a fair complex in Shenzhen, and a Protestant church in Beijing.
“We didn’t plan to come to China. It was a coincidence that we did an entry for the German School in 1998,” says Rewolle, who nearly seven years later now heads an 18-person Beijing office. The firm recently opened offices in Shanghai and in Hanoi, Vietnam.
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