A new art museum in Hangzhou, China, has been designed to look like it's floating in nature while honoring two famous Chinese painters. The Xiao Feng Art Museum, created by ZAO/standardarchitecture, sits at the base of Daci Mountain in Hangzhou's Xihu District, where thick forests meet a concrete courtyard.
The museum was built as a tribute to painters Xiao Feng and Song Ren, and its design follows the natural curves of the surrounding hills. The building forms a continuous loop that looks like a gentle cut in the green mountainside when viewed from above. Its shape winds between the slopes like a line of thought carved in stone and shadow.
Visitors approaching the museum from a forest road discover the entrance gradually as they walk. They enter by passing under a bridge that extends out over the building, which frames a quiet courtyard at the center of the design. This inner garden serves as the museum's focal point, with a water surface that reflects the angled concrete structures above it. The experience is enhanced by the mountain's tree cover and cool air that rises from the shaded spaces beneath the building.
Inside the museum, people move through the galleries in a circular path that the architects designed to match the building's organic layout. The gallery spaces get bigger and smaller as visitors walk through them, creating a rhythm of tight and open areas. Narrow hallways lead to larger rooms, while slanted ramps connect the different floor levels. These transitions are smooth and purposeful, guiding people through changing sequences of light, textures, and framed views of the landscape outside.
The building's angular geometry allows the galleries to extend outward toward the courtyard. These extensions are sharp-edged volumes with large panoramic windows that create visual connections between the inside and outside spaces. From within the galleries, the forest becomes a backdrop for the artworks on display. From the courtyard, the galleries look like floating rooms having a conversation with each other.
The entire structure is made of concrete mixed with black ink pigment, giving the surface a muted, graphite-like color that changes under different lighting conditions. The texture is left exposed, showing the pattern of the wooden forms used to shape it, which adds warmth to the otherwise solid material. The interaction between light and concrete creates the museum's atmosphere: daylight entering through angled openings moves across the rough walls, while at sunset, interior lighting casts soft glows into the courtyard.
This consistent use of materials strengthens the museum's relationship with its natural setting. Against the lush green of the mountain, the dark concrete appears as a human-made layer within the geological landscape. The architecture maintains a careful balance between solid and empty spaces, enclosed areas and views of the surroundings.
In the courtyard, reflecting pools and exposed concrete surfaces create the feeling of a traditional Chinese scholar's garden reimagined in modern form. The reflections create depth that doubles the surrounding environment, while the sound of water softens the building's angular edges. Small trees grow in the spaces between structures, with their leaves brushing against the walls and glass, bringing living elements to complement the mineral composition of the building.
