Museum

The building, which is one of the UNESCO’s WORLD HERITAGE SITES, was extensively renovated and through a new building completed into a museum showing a permanent exhibition as well as exhibitions presenting diverse and specific aspects and topics.

Traversing the winding Randselva river, BIG’s first project in Norway, The Twist, opens as an inhabitable bridge torqued at its center, forming a new journey and art piece within the Kistefos Sculpture Park in Jevnaker, Norway. Kistefos’ new 1,000m2 contemporary art institution doubles as infrastructure to connect two forested riverbanks, completing the cultural route through northern Europe’s largest sculpture park.

Kaomai Museum is an adaptive-reused project within Kaomai Estate 1955, the revitalized project of sixty-three-year old tobacco processing plant estate in Chiang Mai, once a glorious local community’s economic center. Recently, this project was awarded by the 2018 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation in New Design in Heritage Contexts category. PAVA architects designed the museum by considering “the site as a museum”, in which contains the valuable historical and natural heritage. Therefore, Kaomai Estate 1955 is narrated by the “histo-eco museum” routes.

Odunpazari Modern Art Museum is to exhibit the owner’s collection of Turkish modern art. The Museum is planned in the city of Eskisehir where the owner was born and raised. The project is to realize the owner’s ambition to promote Turkish art and to make a cultural contribution to the city of Eskisehir. Eskisehir is known as a university town where the young population is large and the city has a lively and active atmosphere.

After an eight-month renovation, the Biesbosch Museum reopened to the public this summer. The museum has been completely transformed and extended with a new wing that opens to its beautiful surroundings and houses a restaurant and temporary exhibition space for contemporary art. The permanent exhibition that explains the historical development of the region has also been totally revamped. A large water model of the Biesbosch and a freshwater tidal park are also planned on the Museum Island. Building, interior, water model and freshwater tidal park were designed by Studio Marco Vermeulen, and the exhibition was designed by Studio Joyce Langezaal.

Situated nearby the Saint Peter’s Church on Mount Starius in Antakya, that is claimed to have housed the first Christian congregation, the 199-room hotel is erected on a site of archaeological findings dating back to antiquity. The Museum Hotel Antakya pays homage to the amazing mosaics, baths, piazzas discovered during the first drills of the site and draws on the tensioned relationship of Archaeology and Architecture by intertwining the ancient and the modern.

Located in the high-density Xuhui District, in downtown Shanghai, Jade Museum is a renovation from an office building. For this project we were commissioned to convert the noncomplex office space into a multi-functional communication art museum on the premise of keeping the original building structure. Faced with the change in the use of the building, we first deconstruct the straightforward logic of the space and blur the functions’ interface. We implement the tools of digital design early in the conceptual phase, to help us rebuild the logic of space and translate the folding of the circulation flows into a folding of space itself.

The Memorial Museum in Palmiry is integrated into the pine-birch forest surrounding the cemetery. The museum building forms a part of the Kampinos National Park enclosed by steel and glass walls and covered by a green flat roof made of smooth architectural concrete. During the Second World War, the Palmiry woods was the witness to the Nazis massacre of over two thousand Polish civilians mainly from the intellectual elite. The building’s ascetic form and raw construction tell the shocking story and form the background for the exhibition. The exhibition space is placed among the trees – mute witnesses of the tragedy from the past. The relation between the building and the surroundings is emphasised by the introduction of greenery to the interior of the building to illuminate the patio display.