Shenzhen Natural History Museum building news

Shenzhen Natural History Museum Building, China

24 September 2026

Architecture: 3XN, B+H Architects and Zhubo Design Consortium

Location: Pingshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China

Shenzhen Natural History Museum Building

Photos by Adam Mørk

3XN, B+H Architects and Zhubo Design deliver Shenzhen Natural History Museum, a new world-class cultural landmark

The museum unfolds as a civic landscape of five cone-shaped volumes, a walkable roof park and a new public gateway between the city and the wetland edge

New photography reveals a museum defined by a river-delta concept, where architecture and landscape form a continuous whole

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum was designed by the 3XN–B+H Architects–Zhubo Design Consortium, with 3XN as lead designer and B+H Architects serving as lead consultant, executive architect, and landscape architect.

With the opening of Shenzhen Natural History Museum in late summer 2026, Shenzhen is now home to a state-of-the-art natural history museum spanning 100,000 square metres. Under one roof, it brings together exhibitions, innovative approaches to research, education and landscape.

Shenzhen lies on the southern edge of the Pearl River Delta, where coastal lowlands, hills and a subtropical monsoon climate have shaped a richly biodiverse landscape. Set in Pingshan District, the new museum takes its cues from this setting. Its form – and the roof itself – are central to the story. Despite its impressive scale, the building interprets and transforms the character of its surroundings into architectural form. In doing so, it is deeply rooted in its local context, offering Shenzhen and its residents a cultural anchor and a place to gather, while maintaining a global outlook.

The museum’s local grounding is part of a broader story of transformation. In 1980, Shenzhen was a fishing village of around 30,000 people; today, it is a global metropolis of more than 18 million. This is one of the fastest urban transformations in modern history. The city is now widely recognised as a major centre for science, technology and innovation, and is home to Fortune Global 500 companies including Tencent, Huawei and BYD. Building on this success, Shenzhen is also expanding its cultural infrastructure.

Shenzhen Natural History Museum is a flagship project within the municipal government’s Major Cultural Facilities of the New Era programme. Launched to create landmark cultural institutions of international calibre, the programme forms part of the city’s wider strategy to strengthen Shenzhen’s position as a cultural destination.

Delta: landscape as architecture

Nothing in nature is square. Where conventional museums are composed as discrete geometric volumes, the architects conceived the Shenzhen Natural History Museum as a civic landscape, shaped by the same forces of erosion that define the site’s two ecological systems – Yanzi Hill and the Pingshan River.

The building’s gently flowing footprint is drawn from the meandering lines of the Pingshan River, creating a dynamic transition between the city to the south and the wetland landscape to the north. Its sculpted roofline rises into a fully walkable public park, while its granite-clad lamella façade gives the museum the appearance of a cliff face emerging from the water’s edge. Local Shandong stone was selected from the outset to reinforce this geology. Openings appear as fissures in the cliff, admitting daylight and framing views while maintaining the building’s landscape-like character.

Kim Herforth Nielsen, Founder, Senior Partner, Creative Director at 3XN, said:

“Nothing in nature is square. Nature is amorphous, dynamic, and always in formation. From the beginning, the ambition was to create not a building, but a piece of landscape that had always been there – shaped by local geology, water and time. That idea has been carried all the way from the competition stage to the museum that opens today, a place where the story of our planet is experienced as a physical journey through terrain, light and space.”

The project’s flowing geometry was made possible through advanced parametric modelling, scripting and proprietary tools. Based on a simple family of cone geometries, the model enabled the architects to coordinate the heights of the cones, circulation requirements, and spatial clearances with the wider building form. This process allowed the team to adjust individual parameters through design development and construction without losing the coherence of the original concept. The same scripted approach enabled the majority of the façade to be made up of standardised elements, which means its components can be individually removed and replaced, supporting long-term maintenance.

Close coordination between design and construction helped translate the design intent into buildable elements. Digital models were checked against on-site scans to resolve coordination issues as construction progressed.

“Shenzhen is one of the world’s most dynamic urban centres, but it is also a city of exceptional ecological richness, shaped by its mangroves, wetlands, mountains and coastal habitats. Shenzhen Natural History Museum responds to that dual character. Our role was to carry that ambition through from concept to delivery, ensuring that the museum’s flowing form, roofscape and public spaces make the city’s relationship with nature visible at every scale.”

David Stavros, Senior Design Principal, former Executive Vice President, Asia, at B+H Architects

Extend the roof to the city

Set between dense urban development, wetland parkland and Yanzi Hill, the museum is designed as a hinge between the city and the landscape. A central gateway on the south side frames the main museum entrance while linking the urban streetscape with the wetland park beyond.

Its sloping roof extends the surrounding parkland upward into a publicly accessible landscape. The rooftop park is defined by five thematic zones, featuring succulent species, rare and distinctive plants, native species, tropical planting, and species featured in Chinese literature. These extend the museum’s exhibition narrative into the landscape, serving as an open-air natural history gallery for activities such as botanical interpretation walks and nighttime stargazing. Clear hierarchies of pathways, carefully calibrated gradients, intermediate access points on the east and west sides, and a lift core to the roof ensure that accessibility is maximised and that the roof is fully integrated with the museum’s internal functions and exhibitions.

The museum also forms part of the district’s 15 “Walking Pingshan” trails, which collectively span 106 kilometres across Pingshan’s mountains, rivers, parks and cultural facilities, strengthening connections both within the district and to neighbouring areas. Rather than relying on a single formal threshold, the roofscape and ground-level plazas extend existing pedestrian routes and support everyday use as public infrastructure.

At ground level, the arrival landscape, sunken plaza and reflecting pools extend the river-edge topography into the forecourt, strengthening the connection between the museum and the river. The sunken garden employs terraced planting to absorb the steep 30-metre level change from ground level to B2, helping visitors transition comfortably and intuitively into the lower levels. Together, these landscape elements also support stormwater management while creating shaded, stepped spaces for gathering.

“Shenzhen is often understood through the speed of its urban growth, but its natural history is equally compelling. It is a city where mountains, rivers, wetlands and the South China Sea exist in close proximity to one of the world’s most dynamic urban environments. This is an important story to tell and from the beginning, we wanted the landscape to become part of the experience of the museum itself. The roof park, arrival spaces and routes to the wetland extend the visitor journey beyond the galleries, inviting people to encounter planting, water, views and changing seasons as part of the museum’s story of nature.

Wing Cen Yingyin, Senior Landscape Designer, B+H Architects

The museum’s massing and height are also tuned to their context. While the building reaches 36 metres at its highest point, around half of its volume is kept at approximately the same height as the neighbouring school and convention centre, preserving long views to the mountains to the north and reducing visual impact on the surrounding community.

Guiding visitors through discovery

Internally, five cone-shaped volumes organise the principal exhibition halls and give the museum its distinctive spatial character.

The museum’s central lobby is shaped as a generous atrium at the heart of the building and acts as the central point of arrival. Conceived around the concept of the “Tree of Life”, the space expresses the complex and continuous process of biological evolution into architecture. A sculptural staircase spirals upward through the atrium, rising layer by layer around the central volume and creating a sense of growth and movement through the building.

The atrium connects all levels, brings natural light deep into the interior through a rooflight, and provides clear sightlines between the exhibition floors while also offering glimpses into the conservation, education, research and administration spaces above. The volume can also host events, gatherings and other public or private museum programming, making it both the museum’s main orientation point and one of its most flexible spaces.

Designed to encourage exploration, visitors choose their own path through the museum from this central space, encountering the story of natural history in a sequence that is personal to them. Generally, there is an accessible “scenic” route via ramps, an “active” route via the open stair wrapped around the lift core, or a “direct” route via elevators. The ramps link the lobby to the lower-ground exhibition area and the second-floor galleries, functioning as a promenade that can also accommodate displays and seating.

Moving between the cones, visitors pass through a sequence of cave-like passages, atria, ramps and terraces, with framed views that shift constantly between inside and outside and between different levels of the building. Changes in scale create moments of compression and release, turning circulation into part of the experience itself and making curiosity feel physical as well as intellectual.

The cones are finished in golden wood-grain marble sourced from Guangxi Province, with warm tones and layered texture that evoke geological strata, creating a tactile counterpoint to the brighter, cliff-like surfaces of the façade and circulation spaces.

For the curved interior stone surfaces, detailed modelling guided fabrication and installation, helping preserve the intended geometry and spatial experience. Individual slabs were scanned and digitally arranged to coordinate colour and veining across the curved surfaces, creating a cohesive finish that reinforces the museum’s natural history narrative. The stone is mounted and carefully sanded at the joints on site by local craftsmen, drawing on China’s long tradition of stone craftsmanship while giving it a contemporary architectural expression. The clarity of the visitor experience is underpinned by a technically robust spatial strategy. Each cone is formed by a double-layered skin with an internal volume. This volume accommodates services, fire stairs and other operational infrastructure. By building this capacity into the architecture from the outset, the design intention can be preserved throughout while allowing a complex museum programme to operate efficiently over time.

Designed as column-free volumes, the cones can also be closed independently for maintenance, deinstallation or reconfiguration, allowing the curatorial layout to adapt over time without disrupting the visitor experience elsewhere in the museum.

“A natural history museum is a highly complex building, but we wanted to use architecture to make the spaces feel simple and instinctive. We also wanted curiosity to become a physical experience. The cones, ramps and atrium work together so visitors can move through the museum in different ways, discover new views at every turn and feel as though they are navigating a landscape, constantly learning through discovery.”

Camilla Bundgaard, Senior Associate, 3XN

The museum also includes a 500-seat theatre, a 250-seat immersive cinema, a 200-seat multi-dimension theatre, a 23-metre-diameter dome cinema and dedicated research and conservation spaces, alongside restaurants and other visitor amenities.

Exhibition design and scenography

The architects worked closely with exhibition designers Atelier Brückner and Museum Studio to shape the museum’s exhibition planning, scenography and public-facing experience. Together, the teams developed a museum-wide approach built around two complementary operating modes: an informative, participatory idle mode for everyday visits, and a fully immersive show mode for scheduled presentations. The museum’s curved walls, cone geometries and vertical volumes are used directly as tools for projection, movement and narrative. The exhibition design and the building’s spatial structure are conceived as a single system from the outset.

The exhibition journey moves from cosmology and the origins of the universe to geology, evolution and the age of dinosaurs, combining physical specimens, digital media, data visualisation and immersive scenography. The museum’s spatial structure is used to shape movement, atmosphere and narrative, so that the transition between galleries contributes to a broader story about the planet, life and deep time.

“The Natural History Museum Shenzhen gave us the extraordinary opportunity to translate the history of our planet into a spatial and emotional experience. Our ambition was to create an experience that connects knowledge with emotion, and science with a sense of wonder. By bringing together authentic objects, architecture, media and scenography, we wanted to open new perspectives and inspire curiosity about the forces that have shaped our world – and those that will shape its future.”

Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, Managing Director of ATELIER BRÜCKNER

“Working in partnership, our teams designed the exhibition experience combining immersive technologies, audiovisual media, and hands-on displays into a cohesive and narrative-driven experience. The distinctive architecture was itself a source of inspiration, guiding us toward immersive and sculptural exhibition designs in full dialogue with the building’s vision. The result is a museum designed to inspire empathy and ecological awareness, ambitious in scale yet genuinely accessible in experience.”

Delphine de Canecaude, President and CEO of Museum Studio

Environmental stewardship

The museum’s environmental strategy brings together health and wellbeing, and blue–green infrastructure, aligning the project with Shenzhen’s wider sponge city agenda. Rainwater collected from the roof is stored and cleaned before being reused for cooling, irrigation and flushing, while the surrounding landscape is designed to manage stormwater, reduce pressure on the sewer system and replenish groundwater.

The roof park and adjoining landscape also extend the ecological character of the site, connecting the museum to the adjacent wetland environment and supporting biodiversity through planted terrain and water-sensitive landscape design.

“Shenzhen Natural History Museum is designed to interpret the laws of natural evolution and present the geographies of Shenzhen in a global ecological perspective. It brings together collections and research that trace 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history, but it is the architecture that makes this story tangible. By turning the museum into a living educational landscape — from the roof park to the cone-shaped galleries — it allows visitors from Shenzhen and around the world to experience science, nature and place as one continuous journey that is specific to its place.”

Nan Zhaoxu, Director, Shenzhen Natural History Museum Preparatory Office

Shenzhen’s momentum as a visitor city was underscored at the start of 2026, when it welcomed more than three million tourists over the New Year holiday and generated over two billion yuan (300 million US dollars) in tourism revenue, highlighting growing demand for major cultural experiences.

The new museum reflects the scale and ambition of the region’s city, giving Shenzhen a cultural institution that matches its reputation for world-class innovation and design.

Shenzhen Natural History Museum is both a new cultural landmark and a new kind of civic landscape: a museum shaped by geology, urban ambition and public life, and designed to evolve with the city around it. Through close international collaboration, the project brings architecture, exhibition design and environmental strategy together as one continuous experience, creating a destination that reflects Shenzhen’s scale, creativity and future-facing spirit.

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Previously on e-architect:

28 July 2026

Design: 3XN-B+H Architects -Zhubo Design Consortium

Location: Pingshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

First look: Shenzhen Natural History Museum opens to the public

Photos: Adam Mørk

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum was undertaken by the 3XN-B+H Architects -Zhubo Design Consortium, with 3XN as lead designer and B+H Architects serving as lead consultant, executive architect and landscape architect. Zhubo provided local technical and compliance support.

SHENZHEN, 28th July 2026 – Shenzhen Natural History Museum officially opens to the public today, marking the arrival of one of the world’s largest new natural history museums and the largest in South China.

As a flagship of Shenzhen’s investment in a ‘new era’ of cultural institutions, the museum gives the city a major new cultural landmark – one that matches its leadership in science, education and public life, and strengthens its profile as a global centre for innovation and design.

Designed by the 3XN, B+H Architects and Zhubo Design consortium, the museum spans over 100,000-square-metres and rises from the surrounding river-delta landscape beside Yanzi Lake as a continuous terrain of sloping roof, terraces and plazas. Conceived as a civic landscape as much as a museum, it brings architecture, ecology and civic space into one connected experience, with a walkable public roof that extends the natural ground plane and invites everyday use beyond the threshold of the galleries.

From the city, the museum appears as a flowing geological form, with its granite façade and carved openings hinting at the exhibition spaces embedded within. Its flowing silhouette draws on the local river systems and surrounding hills, while internally, five cone-shaped volumes organise the museum’s principal exhibition halls and define its spatial character. Moving between the cones, visitors experience the building as a sequence of cave-like passages, atria, terraces and framed views, turning the story of natural history into an immersive journey through form, light and landscape.

Inside, eight themed exhibition halls guide visitors through 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history, from the origins of the universe to the emergence of life, dinosaurs, human evolution and the ecological systems that shape Shenzhen and the wider world. The museum exhibits animal, plant, mineral and fossil specimens, alongside large‑scale installations and media environments that connect global natural history narratives with the specific mountains, rivers and seas of South China.

The architects worked closely with exhibition designers Atelier Brückner and Museum Studio on the scenography for the main galleries. The curved walls, cone geometries and vertical volumes are used to create immersive, media‑rich environments that bring the exhibition narrative to life. Across the museum, specimens, large‑scale installations and cinematic media are interwoven with the architecture, transforming visitors from observers into active participants in the natural history story.

David Stavros, Senior Design Principal, former Executive Vice President, Asia, at B+H Architects, said:

“Transforming this ambition into a world-class natural history museum demanded far more than delivering a building of exceptional scale and complexity. It called for architecture, engineering, landscape, exhibition planning and construction expertise to work seamlessly together. Central to this is the roof park, which extends the museum into Shenzhen’s civic landscape, inviting visitors to experience it as part of the city itself. The result demonstrates what multidisciplinary collaboration can achieve when design ambition, delivery expertise and technical rigour come together.”

The museum is the result of a close international collaboration, bringing together 3XN’s design leadership from Copenhagen, B+H Architects’ leadership of project delivery and landscape design, and Zhubo Design’s local technical and compliance knowledge in Shenzhen. Realising the project required sophisticated coordination across disciplines, geographies and construction phases, preserving the clarity of the original competition-winning concept while delivering a building of significant technical and architectural complexity.

Further views of the museum’s interior spaces, exhibitions and rooftop landscape will be shared in the coming weeks as the museum welcomes its first visitors and establishes itself as a major cultural destination for both local communities and international visitors.

Nan Zhaoxu, Director of Shenzhen Natural History Museum, said:

“Shenzhen Natural History Museum is designed to interpret the laws of natural evolution and present the geographies of Shenzhen in a global ecological perspective. It brings together collections and research that trace 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history, but it is the architecture that makes this story tangible. By turning the museum into a living educational landscape – from the roof park to the cone‑shaped galleries – it allows visitors from Shenzhen and around the world to experience science, nature and place as one continuous journey that is specific to its place.”

Shenzhen Natural History Museum, Guangdong, China – Building Information

Project information

Project name: Shenzhen Natural History Museum
Location: Pingshan District, Shenzhen, China
Design Consortium: 3XN, B+H Architects, and Zhubo Design
3XN (Lead Designer; Concept Design), B+H Architects (Lead Consultant, Executive Architect, Landscape Architect, Interior Design), Zhubo Design (Local technical compliance and delivery)
Engineer: Zhubo Design (Structural, MEP)
Client: Shenzhen Government /Bureau of Public Works of Shenzhen Municipality
Tenant: Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism, and Sports
Gross Floor Area: 105,300 m²
Construction start: March 2022
Completion: July 2026
Photography: Adam Mørk

3XN

About 3XN

3XN is an architecture practice founded in Denmark with a global commitment to innovative, sustainable, and impactful design. This multidisciplinary, diverse and international outlook informs and enriches our collaborative culture and multi-dimensional approach to design. Our work is driven by the fundamental belief that architecture must contribute positively to people, places, and the planet.

3XN, founded in 1986 by Kim Herforth Nielsen, offers nearly four decades of experience in designing and building human-focused architecture. Our approach is defined by a holistic methodology that values aesthetics, behaviour, curiosity, and circularity. We believe that architecture isn’t just about space but actively shapes the behaviours and experiences of those who inhabit it. Aesthetics and function go hand in hand in our design process. They work in concert, each reinforcing the other, to ensure that spaces are not only visually inspiring but also conducive to well-being and social cohesion. Central to our design philosophy is an ongoing curiosity—an intellectual openness to new ideas and approaches that challenges us to continually push the boundaries of what architecture can achieve. This curiosity fuels a collaborative, transparent process that encourages the exchange of ideas and enables us to innovate, particularly in the realm of sustainable design. Our practice is driven by a commitment to research and exploration, constantly seeking ways to improve upon existing methods, technologies, and materials. With offices in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Sydney, New York, London and Amsterdam, their work combines the playful and poetic with the renewable and resilient.

GXN is a strategic consultancy for the built environment, founded by 3XN in 2007, with offices in Copenhagen and London. GXN leads teams in impactful strategic innovation and design-led research to design, build, and live in ways that better align human and planetary needs. GXN’s research-based processes and evidence-based insights, combined with 3XN’s design expertise, have allowed the consultancy to generate holistic visions that turn concepts into forward-looking architecture with provable impact and demonstrable value.

https://3xn.com/

About B+H Architects

B+H Architects is a global, award-winning design and consulting practice with more than 70 years of experience in architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, planning, and advisory services. The firm combines design excellence with technical rigour to create functional, enduring environments that are deeply connected to place.

Operating from studios in Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, B+H’s multidisciplinary teams collaborate across geographies, sectors, and scales to transform spaces, communities, and economies through bold, purposeful design. With iconic landmark projects in more than 30 countries, B+H brings global perspective and local insight to every project.

B+H Architects is a SJ Group company, part of a diverse collective of problem solvers for the built environment, continually reimagining ways to create a smarter, more sustainable future.

https://bharchitects.com/
https://www.sjgroup.com/

About Zhubo Design

Founded in 1996 and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2019, Zhubo Design Co., Ltd. is a comprehensive design organization with over 1,600 professionals across architecture, urban planning and interior design. Holding Class-A qualifications in construction engineering and urban planning, Zhubo delivers full-process design services from concept through construction documentation and on-site coordination, with recognised expertise in prefabricated building, BIM, eco-building, sponge city and intelligent building technologies.

http://www.zhubo.com/en/index

3XN Architects

Shenzhen Natural History Museum building, China images / information received 280726 from 3XN

Location: Pingshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China, East Asia.