About Hainan Science and Technology Museum

Hainan Science and Technology Museum

The Hainan Science and Technology Museum is a science museum in Haikou, the capital of Hainan Province, China's tropical island province in the South China Sea. Its Chinese name is 海南科技馆, and in much English-language architecture coverage it is shortened to the Hainan Science Museum; the full name used here follows Wikipedia's title for the institution. It stands on Haikou's west coast, at the edge of the Wuyuan River National Wetland Park, about 600 metres southeast of the Wuyuan River Stadium. Completed in 2025, the museum is one of the newest major science museums in China, and one of the most architecturally distinctive: a silver, spiral, cloud-like building designed by Ma Yansong and MAD Architects. It is not the Hainan Museum, the province's history and art museum elsewhere in Haikou, and no facts from that separate institution belong in this profile.

Commission and purpose

The museum was commissioned by the Haikou Association for Science and Technology as the provincial science and technology museum for Hainan and an important popular-science base for the Hainan Free Trade Port. Ma Yansong has explained the thinking behind it in terms that recur throughout the project's coverage: “A science museum is about education and imagining the future; we want nature to be part of that vision as well.” Rather than a closed monument visited once, MAD conceived the building to work more like a public library for science — a place local schools and residents would use repeatedly to explore science, technology and nature together.

That everyday purpose shaped its siting. The museum stands in a new district of the Free Trade Port on Haikou's west coast, in the Changxiu area, surrounded by wetlands and new development including schools and a connecting highway. Coverage of its opening records that it sits within reach of more than 30 schools and kindergartens — within about 3 kilometres in the museum's own account of its catchment — making class visits a practical, routine possibility rather than a special expedition. It has been named one of Hainan Province's Top Ten Public Cultural Facilities.

Design and construction, 2019 to 2025

The project was developed from 2019. MAD's design phase began in 2020, ground was broken in November 2021, and the main structure was completed in June 2023. Curtain wall and landscape construction followed, with completion in 2025. The long construction period reflects both the building's unusual geometry and its coastal tropical setting: Haikou is renowned for warm climate, white-sand beaches and lush landscapes, but its rainy season, humidity and winter fog in the north of the island place demanding requirements on a large public building's envelope and drainage.

The client was the Haikou Association for Science and Technology, with project management by Haikou Construction Engineering Group. MAD's principal partners on the project were Ma Yansong, Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano, leading a large design team. Exhibition design was by Shanghai Kaiyi Architectural Design. The result is a complex of about 46,528 square metres — Wikipedia gives a closely similar figure of 45,528 square metres for the building — on a site of about 40,000 square metres, arranged over six storeys in the museum's own description, with five levels above ground and one below in project listings.

The updraft form and the silver shell

The building's form is its signature. MAD designed a biomorphic, spiral volume intended to resemble an “updraft” — the upward movement of warm air rising from the Earth's surface — and, in other descriptions, a soft cloud. A wide canopy lifts off the ground floor, shading an open plaza beneath the museum and pulling public space under the building itself, so that part of the museum's civic life happens outdoors and without a ticket.

The exterior is clad in 843 panels of fibre-reinforced polymer, forming a silver shell whose appearance shifts with daylight, sky and weather. The panels are detailed with open seams and water-guiding grooves for effective drainage in Hainan's rainy climate, and each panel was shaped to follow the building's continuous curves. Slim, expansive openings follow the form of the building, connecting the ring-shaped galleries to views of the surrounding greenery and wetland landscape.

Structure: three cores and no columns

Structurally, the entire spiral is carried by three concrete core tubes. This single decision explains much of the building's character. The three cores eliminate the need for columns on the exhibition floors, creating long, open, uninterrupted gallery spaces in which exhibitions can be laid out freely and changed over time. They also lift the ring-shaped volume above an open ground level, so the museum appears to float above its reflecting pools, sunken plaza and shaded canopy — an illusion noted in almost every account of the finished building.

At ground level, a winding canopy punctuated with rounded openings shelters glass-walled public spaces including an amphitheatre, a cinema, temporary exhibition space and a sunken courtyard, connected by a covered walkway and flanked at one end by a reflecting pool. A planetarium is held within a separate rounded volume with a domed roof emerging beyond the canopy. The covered plaza and reflecting pool recorded in the museum's basic description are therefore not decoration: they are part of a ground plane deliberately kept open to the city and the wetland park.

Inside: the spiral ramp and the atrium

At the heart of the building is a continuous spiral ramp that connects all the exhibition floors. It ascends around a central, glass-domed atrium — described in opening coverage as rising like a twisting strand of DNA — bathed in natural light from a circular glass skylight that crowns the five-storey atrium and draws daylight deep into the upper floors. Visitors are typically brought by elevator to the uppermost exhibition level and then follow the broad, gently descending ramp as it coils around the central void, passing a sequence of galleries and activity spaces; the route can also be explored in the other direction, since the galleries are designed as open-plan spaces that flow into one another rather than sitting behind separate doors.

On one side of the route, tall windows frame views of the surrounding greenery; on the other, the ramp passes the galleries themselves. The choreography is central to MAD's educational idea: movement through the building is itself a gradual descent through the museum's subjects, from the largest scales of the universe to the living systems of Hainan itself.

Exhibitions: from deep space to tropical agriculture

Distinct themes define the exhibition floors, transitioning from deep space and the ocean to Hainan's rainforests and tropical agriculture. Opening coverage describes offshoot galleries dedicated to subjects ranging from marine ecosystems and life sciences to aerospace technology. That sequence — space, ocean, rainforest, agriculture — is specific to Hainan: an island province surrounded by the South China Sea, covered in tropical rainforest and shaped by tropical farming, presenting its own environment as the final subject of its science museum.

The museum also includes outdoor education spaces. Shaded outdoor planting areas, connected by the covered walkway, are used for hands-on plant and agriculture education, with landscaped teaching plots organised around regional species and observable plant phenomena. In Hainan's climate, the boundary between indoor gallery and outdoor learning can be porous in a way that would be impossible in northern China, and the design exploits that advantage fully.

Planetarium, cinema and public facilities

Alongside the galleries, the complex includes a planetarium and a giant-screen cinema, both recorded in the museum's basic facilities and in every major account of its opening. Interactive learning areas are tailored to visitors of all ages, and the ground-level programme — amphitheatre, temporary exhibition space, sunken plaza and covered plaza — gives the museum capacity for events, school assemblies and temporary displays beyond the permanent exhibition route. Together these elements make the building a full cultural complex rather than a single exhibition hall.

Opening and first visitors

The museum was completed in 2025 and opened to the public following a trial, or soft, opening period. That soft opening was a striking success: within the first four months of opening, the museum received about 350,000 visitors, with peak days receiving over 5,800 people. For a new institution in a city district still under development, those figures demonstrated immediate demand from the schools and families of Haikou for whom the museum was built.

Admission is free, but booking is required — a system that lets the museum manage the peak-day crowds its opening period revealed while keeping access open to all. The museum's official website is at hainanstm.cn, where visitor information and booking are published. Named among Hainan Province's Top Ten Public Cultural Facilities, and standing beside the Wuyuan River National Wetland Park and Stadium on Haikou's west coast, the Hainan Science and Technology Museum has quickly taken its place as the island province's principal home for public science — a building whose rising, silver spiral makes its subject, the meeting of technology and nature, visible from across the district.