Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art Opens Under BIG’s Ribbon Roof
The 60,000 sq m museum on Jinji Lake, twelve pavilions under one continuous roof, is the first art museum completed by Bjarke Ingels Group. It takes its plan from the corridors of Suzhou's gardens.
The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art has opened on the shore of Jinji Lake, in the Suzhou Industrial Park district east of the old city. Designed by BIG, the practice of Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, with the Chinese firms ARTS Group and SHUISHI, the 60,000-square-metre building is the first art museum the studio has completed anywhere.
A garden corridor, enlarged
Suzhou is the city of China’s classical gardens, nine of which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. One of their recurring elements is the lang, the covered walkway that winds between pavilions and frames views of water, rock and planting. BIG has taken that element as the plan of the whole museum.
The building is organised as twelve pavilions beneath a single continuous roof, which rises and falls like a ribbon and recalls the tiled eaves of the old town. Glazed corridors connect the pavilions and serve as galleries themselves, so that visitors move through the museum as they would through a garden, with courtyards opening on either side. Bjarke Ingels has described the aim as creating a connection between the city and the lake. The grounds are public: paths lead through sculpture gardens to the waterfront without a ticket.
Opening programme
The museum opened with several exhibitions, including a presentation of works by Picasso, a survey of contemporary Chinese art and “Materialism”, an exhibition on ten materials used in BIG’s own projects, which had been shown in the building during a preview period from late 2025.
Suzhou’s architectural pairing
The comparison with the Suzhou Museum is hard to avoid. I. M. Pei, whose family came from the city, completed that building in 2006 beside the Humble Administrator’s Garden, as a late work that translated white walls and grey roofs into geometry. Twenty years later the new museum does something similar at a far larger scale and in the new town, across the city from Pei’s.
The two can be seen in a day. Suzhou is about 25 minutes from Shanghai by high-speed train, and Jinji Lake is on the metro. The city’s restaurants were included for the first time in the combined Michelin Guide Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang this year, and Mandarin Oriental has announced a hotel on the same lake. Most visitors still stay in Shanghai and come for the day.