HAS Design and Research Carves a Cave-Like Museum from Curved Walls in Hefei, China

Most museums greet you with a lobby. The Simple Design Archive Gallery in Hefei, China, greets you with a geological event. Designed by HAS Design and Research, the 440-square-meter space unfolds through nearly ten curved white walls that spiral and overlap like eroded rock formations, drawing visitors away from the urban noise outside and into something closer to a cave system open to the sky. Founders Jenchieh Hung and Kulthida Songkittipakdee cite the nearby Huangshan Mountain as a direct influence, and the connection is legible: this is architecture that borrows the logic of landscape rather than the conventions of gallery design.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the refusal to separate structure, enclosure, display, and wayfinding into distinct systems. The continuous curved walls do all of those jobs at once. They block the harsh western sun, guide circulation, form shelving alcoves, and create intimate courtyards that attract birds and cicadas. In a city where museums often default to neutral white boxes, HAS Design and Research has produced a space where the walls themselves are the experience, and everything exhibited within them is filtered through an atmosphere of light, shadow, and seasonal change.

Thresholds That Slow You Down

The entrance is deliberately indirect. Rather than a single doorway opening onto the street, visitors encounter a layered sequence of arched portals and curving plaster walls that bend sightlines and muffle sound. Each threshold filters a little more of the city away. The raised signage above the entry is understated, almost ceremonial, reinforcing the sense that crossing into this building is a deliberate act rather than a casual one.

This strategy of delay is the project's strongest spatial idea. By the time visitors reach the interior galleries, they have already passed through multiple atmospheric transitions: from pavement to gravel, from noise to birdsong, from direct sunlight to the filtered glow that the curved walls allow. It is a decompression sequence, and it makes the art and furniture inside feel earned rather than encountered.

The Echo Chamber Courtyard

HAS Design and Research calls the central courtyard an "echo chamber," and the term is apt. Lightly planted with slender maples and fragrant shrubs over dark gravel, this outdoor room functions as both an acoustic buffer and a small ecosystem. The architects report that cicadas, birds, and other wildlife have been drawn to the space, introducing natural soundscapes that replace the traffic noise just meters away.

The courtyard also operates as a light engine. During afternoon hours, the tall curved walls filter western sunlight into shifting patterns across the gravel and tree canopies. It is the kind of effect that changes by the hour and the season, giving the museum a temporal dimension that no fixed installation could replicate. The planting is sparse enough that the architecture remains dominant, but generous enough that the space feels alive.

Spiraling from Above

Seen from above, the building reads as a cluster of interlocking circles, each one housing a courtyard, a gallery, or a transition zone. The geometry is clearly indebted to organic forms, but it never tips into the decorative. Every curve serves a functional purpose: defining a room, directing a view, or sheltering a planted area from wind. The dark gravel beds between the white volumes heighten the contrast and make the plan legible even at a distance.

The aerial views at dusk, when interior lighting spills upward through skylights and courtyards, reveal the building's sectional ambition. These are not flat-roofed boxes; they are carved volumes whose ceilings and walls form continuous surfaces. The illuminated tree canopies rising from within the circles give the whole composition the quality of a topographic model, a series of craters and peaks.

Curved Walls as Display Infrastructure

Inside, the curved walls become the primary display system. Built-in shelving follows the arc of each wall, creating alcoves that present handcrafted wooden chairs, sculptural objects, and colorful lamps as individual episodes rather than items in a catalogue. The recessed cove lighting reinforces this: each alcove receives its own soft wash of light, separating it from the next without the need for partitions or vitrines.

The five-meter-high ceilings in the main gallery allow furniture and artwork to breathe. A round dining table occupies the center of one room, surrounded by the gentle sweep of white plaster, and the effect is closer to inhabiting a sculpture than walking through a showroom. The architects have succeeded in making display feel spatial rather than decorative, which is exactly the right approach for a collection that spans contemporary Asian art and Northern European furniture.

Light, Courtyards, and the Interior Landscape

Skylights are the primary light source for the galleries, and HAS Design and Research has used them to eliminate the distractions of the surrounding streetscape while maintaining a strong connection to the sky. Looking upward through the interior courtyards, visitors see tree canopies framing patches of cloud. The effect is immersive: you are simultaneously indoors, outdoors, and underground, depending on where you stand.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing along the courtyard edges allows the planted interiors to serve as living backdrops for the gallery rooms. A dining area with timber chairs looks directly into a grove of saplings, and the boundary between served space and garden dissolves into a single continuous experience. This is passive design at its most poetic: the courtyards temper the climate, introduce daylight, and provide visual relief, all without mechanical intervention.

Atmosphere After Dark

At twilight, the building transforms. The white plaster facades glow under artificial light, and the arched openings become luminous frames for the planted courtyards within. The cylindrical volumes read as lanterns from the street, their soft radiance a deliberate counterpoint to the harsher illumination of the surrounding city. One image captures the building in mist, its volumes dissolving into atmosphere like the mountain scenery that inspired them.

The nighttime character matters because it extends the building's public role beyond operating hours. Even when the galleries are closed, the illuminated courtyards and glowing facades contribute to the streetscape, offering the neighborhood a piece of landscape that never fully shuts down.

Inside the Gallery Flow

The interior circulation has no corridors in the conventional sense. Movement flows from one curved room to the next through arched openings that maintain visual continuity while creating distinct spatial moments. The pale flooring and white walls establish a calm baseline against which the timber furniture and artwork register clearly. Vaulted ceilings in certain rooms add vertical drama, pulling the eye upward toward floating shelves and soft diffused daylight.

What is most successful here is the avoidance of the typical gallery grid. There are no right angles to reset your orientation, no long axial views that reveal everything at once. The building unfolds gradually, rewarding slow movement. That deliberate pace mirrors the architects' stated interest in the overlap between minimalism, material research, and the poetic.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans confirm what the photographs suggest: the building is organized as a cluster of circular and near-circular rooms, each defined by a single curving wall that is both structure and enclosure. Radius dimensions on the dimensioned plan reveal the deliberate variation in curvature from room to room, which is what prevents the interior from feeling repetitive. The axonometric drawing, with its red circulation figures, makes the interlocking logic legible in a way that a plan alone cannot: visitors weave through overlapping arcs, never retracing their steps.

The elevations and sections show a building that reads as restrained and rectilinear from the street, with the curving drama largely contained within. Trees punctuate the roofline, and the profiles are low enough to sit comfortably within their urban context. The early sketches, with their loose organic clusters, reveal a design process that started with landscape intuition and only later resolved into buildable geometry. That trajectory from sketch to built form is visible in the finished project, which retains the looseness of its origins.

Why This Project Matters

The Simple Design Archive Gallery matters because it demonstrates that a small museum, just 440 square meters, can achieve the kind of atmospheric richness usually reserved for much larger cultural institutions. By investing in the quality of the threshold sequence, the courtyard ecosystem, and the multifunctional curved walls, HAS Design and Research has compressed an entire landscape experience into a compact urban footprint. The building does not need monumental scale to be memorable; it needs only the discipline to let every wall, opening, and planted bed do multiple things at once.

More broadly, the project offers a compelling alternative to the white-box gallery model that still dominates contemporary museum design in China and elsewhere. Here, the architecture is not a neutral backdrop for art but an active participant in the visitor's experience, shaping how light enters, how sound travels, and how the body moves through space. That integration of architecture, landscape, and curation into a single spatial system is the project's real contribution, and it is one that deserves study.

Simple Design Archive Gallery, designed by HAS Design and Research (Jenchieh Hung and Kulthida Songkittipakdee). Hefei, Anhui, China. 440 square meters. Completed 2024. Photography by W Workspace.

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