On the northern shore of Wuhan‘s Moon Lake, the Qintai Art Museum rises like a concrete landform. Designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus in collaboration with CITIC Design Institute, this structure opened on December 28, 2022, welcoming the public with the Wuhan Biennale. The building occupies 43,080 square meters, with more than half of its volume placed underground to preserve the lakeside landscape.

To the south, the building slopes into the earth, while its northern and western sides present vertical concrete facades to the city. The roof forms a series of stepped terraces. Silver metallic panels line the vertical risers, catching the shifting river light. White gravel and low vegetation cover the flat treads, crunching softly under the feet of visitors who traverse the winding wooden pathways. These public paths remain open after hours, connecting the park directly to a second-floor café. Four circular voids pierce this rooftop; three serve as open-air terraces, while the smallest opens onto a quiet courtyard framing a single, solitary tree.

Inside, the museum features China‘s largest single-body fair-faced concrete structure, with a total fair-faced concrete area of 72,000 square meters. To support the undulating spaces with minimal columns, engineers used building information modeling and robotic surveying to create nearly 10,000 waffle-like concrete cells across the ceiling. The exhibition walls are hollow concrete structures, with a forty-centimeter-wide cavity between two concrete panels. Workers threaded all heating, electrical, and fire-prevention conduits through these narrow internal cavities, leaving the gallery surfaces clean and unobstructed for massive contemporary artworks.

Visitors moving through the 10,000 square meters of exhibition space encounter a fluid layout where galleries link sequentially. Here, the museum hosted an exhibition marking the 105th anniversary of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, featuring historical works by early founders including Tang Yihe. The Qintai Art Museum stands as a quiet union of heavy engineering and natural geography, inviting the city to walk across its back.