China Design Museum to open in Hangzhou

The newly built China Design Museum (CDM) at the Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province will be open to public on April 8.

The museum, with a total area of 16,800 square meters, was designed by Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza who won the Pritzker Prize in 1992. CDM is the first museum themed on design in the country. CAA spent seven years and 160 million yuan ($25.35 million) to complete the construction.

The academy has three architecture masterpieces – the design museum, the Folk Art Museum of CAA designed by Kengo Kuma from Japan and the expert building by Wang Shu, China's first Pritzker Prize winner.

CDM will be a permanent space for exhibitions and the preservation of existing collections of the Bauhaus – the transient but globally influential German art school. Meanwhile, it will set up a few functional areas for documentary materials and artworks from home and abroad, according to Yuan Youmin, curator of CDM.

In April, there will be some opening exhibitions including Italian fashion designs and a solo exhibition of Siza's works.

A view of China Design Museum at Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province [Photo/zjol.com.cn]