Büro Ziyu Zhuang sinks 3,920-square-metre museum cluster into a Chinese meadow

Four cultural buildings totalling 3,920 square metres now sit in parkland along Zishan Lake in Xianning, Hubei Province, and Büro Ziyu Zhuang wants you to barely notice them. The centrepiece is the 3,000-square-metre Zi Museum, a multi-faceted, layered structure built from pale concrete and organised around a central courtyard.

The Chinese studio, also known as BUZZ, embedded the cluster — a museum, a meditation tower, a rammed-earth workshop and a bookshop — to complement the guest houses of the Ziyouji resort across the lake. There are no forced axes or rigid zoning between the buildings; the studio says they connect "organically through gentle slopes, undulating lawns, and landscaped pathways, blending seamlessly into the existing meadow."

That's the brief, delivered literally. The grass does most of the architectural work.

How does one building serve two audiences?

BUZZ gave the museum three separate access points at various levels, following the natural elevation of the landscape. The split isn't decorative. It separates birdwatchers from curators.

"Visitors who are here for nature viewing are able to bypass the interior gallery space, accessing the rooftop viewing platform directly from the outdoor park, while a different circulation was created for those who are here for the gallery exhibitions," the studio explained.

"This allows serious academic exhibition and relaxed social gathering to co-exist in the same building," it continued.

The ground floor holds flexible gallery spaces and a garden restaurant. A lower-level entrance sits near the main traffic route, which makes installation setup and collection storage easier — a concession to logistics that visitor-facing architecture often forgets. A path from the main building leads to a viewpoint closer to the lake, and from there visitors can pass through the central courtyard onto a viewing ramp to the rooftop.

Inside, BUZZ organised the interiors as an "open labyrinth", with galleries, public passages, and rest and hospitality areas intertwined. The free-flowing layout was designed to evoke wandering through a Chinese garden. A museum you can get pleasantly lost in. Deliberately, one assumes.

What are the other three buildings?

Next to the museum stands a viewpoint the studio calls a "meditation tower", with stairs circulating around a hollow core. The stairs continue underground, leading to a sunken courtyard wrapped in metal mesh. The tower doubles as a venue for small outdoor gatherings and exhibitions.

The rammed-earth workshop, the third building, embeds into the landscape most directly. Like the museum, it carries a walking ramp that climbs to a grass-covered rooftop while slightly revealing the entrance below.

The fourth building, a bookshop, wears an overhanging roof that shelters an entrance facing the main street. It steps down towards the lake, where its glass facade opens to frame views over the parkland and water.

Who built it, and what comes next?

BUZZ designed the cluster without a set route, aiming instead for access to the public art space from every direction of the park. "The overall project manifests as a continuous, open expansion of green space, which provides the flexibility needed for diverse future operations," the studio said.

Project credits list Hubei United Investment Group Co, Ltd as client, with Ziyu Zhuang, Na Li, Zhengdong Qi and Ye Yang as principal designers. Hubei Provincial Architectural Design Institute produced the construction drawings; Hubei Construction Infrastructure Construction Co, Ltd handled construction, and Suzhou Gold Mantis Construction Decoration Co, Ltd the interiors.

Büro Ziyu Zhuang was founded by architect Ziyu Zhuang in 2016 and now keeps offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Berlin. The studio's recent output suggests a running theme: a UFO-shaped gallery sunk into Inner Mongolian grassland, unveiled in May, and a Chengdu observatory resembling a "spaceship or alien form". Buildings that vanish, buildings that look extraterrestrial. The meadow, for now, has the quieter end of the deal.