Foot Lake a forest children's museum

A Forest Children's Museum at Luxehills Eco-City in Chengdu is a 5,736-square-metre building completed in October 2023, led by architect Liu Yang with interiors by MOD Design, landscape by Zhilan and lighting by BPI. The design treats the museum as an iceberg, its inspiration drawn from the five-thousand-year-old icebergs that drift with ocean currents, their charm lying in the undiscovered seven-eighths beneath the surface. The site, across the road from the lively Luxfang centre, is surrounded by sports parks, stadiums, camping areas and commercial streets, and its surroundings changed continuously from design through construction. Rather than forcing the building to adapt to every shifting condition, the design chooses to remain still while the world moves around it. Unlike a conventional museum that penetrates history, this one faces the future, serving children and using space and exhibits to show the diversity of the world and encourage young visitors to explore in their own way. Because exhibition content was unknown under a compressed schedule, the architecture uses generous square box volumes that can be reorganised over time without altering the exterior. Boxes open onto one another through atriums and exterior courtyards, allowing a free-flowing route in which the courtyard acts as a random-access door to any gallery. Large windows turn the interior and exterior into mutual exhibits: passers-by on the plaza see exhibitions and visitors, while inside visitors observe the street. To meet fast-track construction, most mechanical equipment was moved to the roof, which bulked up the volumes; the response, echoing Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapped monuments, was to drape the cluster in a tensile membrane that softens the sharp box boundaries into a pale iceberg floating among the lakes. The semi-transparent membrane reveals layered volumes under changing light, hides the rooftop plant, and holds the boxes together as a single sculpture. The museum is conceived as a dynamic educational platform rather than a static classroom, inviting children to sense the world, discover their interests and actively pursue its mysteries. The project took two years from 2021 to 2023.