AMAZ NG BU LDINGS

ANGELA O’BYRNE aobyrne@e-perez.com

BRINGING THE COSMIC DOWN TO EARTH: THE SHANGHAI ASTRONOMY MUSEUM

If you Were to set a formal challenge for an architect, confiscating their straight lines and right angles would be a particularly diabolical move. However, that’s precisely the limitation the team at Ennead Architects set for themselves as they designed the forms of the Shanghai Astronomy Museum.

In part a tribute to China’s history of astronomy and their ongoing space exploration efforts, the Museum is the largest dedicated astronomy museum in the world. Taking its cues from the curves of orbits and the movement of celestial bodies, the building itself is a marvel of spirals, circles, and spheres in gleaming whites and metallics. You won’t find rigid, rectilinear geometry in space, after all.

From the ground, the building resembles a cross between a futuristic spacecraft and a kind of astrolabe. Considering the stars’ role in navigation, those resonances are likely no accident. That connection between the sky and the sea is reinforced by a large reflecting pool near the entrance and a prominent pearl-like planetarium, which seems to hover gracefully above an oyster-like “shell.” At night, the orb is illuminated from within, resembling a glowing planet or moon.

Of course, sphere-shaped planetariums are nothing new in the world of star study. Typically, astronomy is presented in dark rooms, with star projections shot onto domed ceilings. However, the Shanghai Astronomy Museum is no mere venue for Pink Floyd light shows. It’s a 420,000 square-foot embodiment of the beauty of space.

“In making this building, we wanted to create a place where the institutional mission is fully enmeshed with an architecture that itself is teaching and finds form in some of the fundamental principles that shape our universe,” explains Thomas Wong, a Design Partner at Ennead and the project’s chief architect.

From above, the complex resembles a giant orbital model. An extension of the existing Shanghai Science and Technology Museum complex, the Museum is ringed by concentric lawns arranged in elegant terraces. Conceptually, it was inspired by astronomy’s infamous “three-body problem,” as the Museums’ three main features seem to exert a kinetic and unpredictable pull over each other.

Rather than merely attempting to bring space to life solely though exhibits and artifacts, the Museum puts visitors in direct, physical engagement with the very forces that shape our universe, grounding the celestial through intentional design and careful vantage points.

Throughout the Museum, dramatic skylights and windows highlight the passage of the sun throughout the day, reminding visitors that we’re always in motion—whether we realize it or not. The passing of the years is marked by an elegant, gold-clad opening in the ceiling called the Oculus, a kind of elaborate sundial. Throughout the day, its light moves across the floor to mark the earth’s rotation. And each year, at midday on the summer solstice, the Oculus casts sunlight on a specific spot, demonstrating the reliable precision of our orbit.

Elsewhere, the Museum evokes a sense of weightlessness with its massive, suspended spherical planetarium, seemingly in defiance of the familiar force of gravity. Submerged halfway into the building, the floating orb even encourages daring visitors to venture underneath.

The Museum’s final focal point is the sky itself. Visitors’ progress up a spiraling ramp culminates on the building’s rooftop. Here, sky-gazers can step into the middle of an inverted dome, resembling a massive satellite dish. The concave dish effectively erases the surrounding skyline and encourages a moment of contemplation and wonder. “And at the end of your visit, there is this culminating moment directly with the sky, which is framed and supported by the architecture,” says Wong.

The Shanghai Astronomy Museum is a heartening reminder of how a curatorial environment can serve to enhance its subject matter. When handled well, a museum’s design can raise as many questions as the exhibits it contains, bringing its subject matter to life in imaginative and meaningful ways. n from the edItor’s desk:. Here’s a company we really think you should know about.

Even before the pandemic, air quality was increasingly on people’s minds, from factories to forest fires. Now, amid coronavirus concerns, indoor air quality devices are having a moment as some of the hottest property technologies.

Building owners, businesses and investors alike are betting big that the machines will both protect people and make them feel safer as they return to the offices and other indoor settings. Enter Wynd. The Redwood, California-based company, founded in 2014, recently made headlines in commercial real estate trade publications for raising $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Greensoil PropTech Ventures and DBL Partners.

Wynd’s flagship product is actually two separate portable products – a small, sleek personal air purifier, that can be placed on tables or transported in vehicles and a tracker that slots into the bottom of the device. The personal monitoring portion of the device can be clipped onto clothing to track air quality anywhere you go.

Wynd describess its stout, water-bottle-sized Plus and Essential personal air purifiers as creating “bubbles” or clean air zones immediately around users. Such products are spreading the mainstream use of high efficiency particulate air or HEPA filters and sophisticated tracking and air quality improvement tools that were once only used on spacecraft and in hospitals.

Wynd’s devices actually make real-time adjustments to how they protect people based on what they detect, and they’re WiFi-enabled to make operating and air quality reports easily accessible via Wynd’s app.

The company also offers the Wynd Max room, an air purifier about the size of a dehumidifier, which has a 1,200-square-foot range. It can be paired with the company’s Halo air quality monitor – smoke detector-sized technology that can be placed anywhere in a room for detection.

Wynd is using its recent venture capital-backed fundraising to expand deeper into serving enterprise clients, offering a subscription monitoring service marketed toward small businesses. Property owners can place Wynd’s sensor clusters on walls or inside of buildings’ existing HVAC systems for increased monitoring power. It has been featured in a range of publications, from People to TechCrunch and Time, for its ease of use, affordability and the power of these devices. In other words, these “smart” air purification products make for smart investments.

Shop Wynd’s personal air purifiers (starting at $199) and room solutions (beginning at $399) at: shop.hellowynd.com (And see the companion article on page 29.) n

The Factor Yanjin

Yanjin is the world’s narrowest metropolis. Built along the Nanxi River, between the steep mountains of China’s Yunnan Province, it’s hard to believe that such a place actually exists in real life –no less a city 450,000 people!

At its narrowest point, Yanjin is less than 100 feet wide; the widest part of the city is around 980 feet. It has one main road on each side and even though the city stretches thousands of feet along the river, there aren’t many bridges. Many of the apartment buildings are located right on the banks of the river and are built on stilt-like thin pillars, to protect them from flooding in case the water level rises.

Watch a 2-minute video here n