Viewed from afar, the silver-hued Hami Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space base on Mars. Viewed from above, it resembles a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Nestled in the Gobi desert, in north-west China, the new tourist attraction showcases hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs. But far from reflecting its prehistoric exhibits, the building itself is a modern-day architectural specimen.
Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and sprawling solar farms, the museum is able to operate sustainably while withstanding an extremely harsh environment.
The Hami region is notorious for its scorching summers. Air temperatures can exceed 55C (131F), while the surface ground temperature can reach 80C, says Wang Xiaolin, the director of the museum and a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Violent winds and sandstorms terrorise the area frequently, according to Xiaolin, who has carried out excavation work in Hami for 20 years.
Despite the intimidating conditions, building the museum in the area is important from a scientific perspective because this is where the fossils were buried and found, Xiaolin says. Keeping the fossils local protects the fragile relics and lets visitors see them in their geological context, he adds.
Visitors to the five exhibition halls can expect to see precious fossils discovered by Xiaolin’s team, including one that has preserved the upper and lower jaws, as well as the soft-tissue structures of the head crest of a pterosaur that roamed the area roughly 130m years ago.
Most of the 8,000-sq metre museum is built 8 metres into the ground where temperatures are much lower, which helps it stay cool in summer, says Huai Kaifeng, an architect at Beijing-based Turenscape, which designed the project. In winter, when temperatures can drop below -20C, the design also helps the museum stay warm.
Being largely underground, with seven above-ground entrances, allows the museum to use its energy as efficiently as possible, says Wang Yujia, a landscape architect and associate professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the US, who is not involved in the project. Most of it is able to avoid direct exposure to wind, sand and solar heat and the large temperature swings between day and night in the desert. “This all means that you need much, much less air-conditioning,” Yujia says.
Although air-conditioners have been installed to provide backup, the museum has natural ventilation shafts that allow cool air to sink and hot air to rise and escape. The museum can cut its electricity usage on air conditioning by 94% compared with an above-ground counterpart, according to estimates by Turenscape. This equates to a saving of 223,421kWh of electricity annually – enough to power an average UK home for 89 years.
But the underground space in the desert presented another challenge for the architects: lighting. The team used giant, translucent, ceiling-to-floor funnels to let in as much natural light as possible. These structures slash the museum’s need for artificial lighting by nearly 50%, saving 84,672kWh of electricity a year, according to Turenscape.
The museum was one of the last designs completed by the late Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, the founder of Turenscape. Yu was the brain behind China’s “sponge cities”, a concept that uses nature to prevent flooding in urban areas.
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The museum has its own micro power grid, featuring a solar farm and batteries to store energy. The solar farm is about 1km from the museum, with an outline resembling that of a pterosaur when viewed from above. It is expected to generate more than 22.4GWh of electricity a year, enough to meet the museum’s own demand, Huai says. The museum is still connected to the power grid of the nearby city of Hami to ensure its energy security, he notes.
The museum is also connected to Hami’s water-supplying network, but it has a recycling system on site to collect, process and reuse its grey water.
“Water is precious out here in the Gobi,” Xiaolin says.
For Yujia, the museum is a good example of how a building can be designed to adapt to its natural environment rather than fight against it.
Although technology enables people to build luxury resorts in a desert and keep them cool, such projects require huge amounts of energy and resources, he says.
“It makes sense to work as much as possible with the environmental conditions that are already there, instead of relying entirely on technology to isolate the building from them.”
Examples include a floating exhibition pavilion built in Rotterdam to address rising sea levels, and a giant park with a tilted ground in Bangkok that aims to prevent urban flooding, and a home shaped like a snail’s shell in Iran to help its inhabitants stay cool.
The concept is important for arid areas. “These places are not cities, you don’t necessarily have the basic infrastructure or the resources you desire even if you pay, because money is not magic,” Yujia adds.
Designing buildings and parks to combat natural disasters was a lasting theme throughout Yu’s career, and for Jiinyi Hwang, the chief architect at Turenscape, the museum is no exception.
“Our world is drying. Deserts and arid zones are expanding. Cities are warming. More and more of the built environment is being pushed into climates that were once considered unbuildable,” Hwang says. “If we keep designing with the same assumptions – sealed boxes, glass facades and mechanical climate control – we will consume the very resources these landscapes cannot spare.”
