World Largest Astronomy Museum Will Open on Friday

The world’s largest Astronomy Museum is opening in Shanghai. The museum is a complex curvilinear shape and it has been designed to reflect the geometry of the cosmos. The museum has no straight lines or right angles used throughout, the structure is instead formed from three overlapping arcs that allude to the orbits of celestial bodies.

The World’s Largest Astronomy Museum will open on Friday. The museum has 420,000-square-foot, it is a branch of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. It will house exhibitions, a planetarium, an observatory and a 78-foot-tall solar telescope. It was conceived by US firm Ennead Architects, which in 2014 won an international competition to design the building.

Thomas J Wong, the lead designer of the Astronomy Museum said that they thought that they could leverage the architecture to bring incredible impact to this whole experience. The building is meant to be this embodiment of astronomically inspired architecture. By foregoing straight walls in favor of arcing lines, Wong and his team hoped to show that everything in the universe is in constant motion and governed by an array of forces.

According to the lead designer they were influenced by the three-body problem, the unsolved question of how to calculate the motion of three celestial entities like planets, moons or stars. That is based on the gravitational relationships to one another. The calculation can be carried out with two celestial bodies, the pathways become chaotic and unpredictable with threeIn Wong’s design, the cosmic riddle translates into three arcing shapes: an oculus, sphere and inverted dome referencing the sun, moon and stars, respectively. Each houses an important visitor attraction or design function.