Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum by Zhu Pei

Photo: © Zhu Pei, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo: © Zhu Pei, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Completed in 2020 in Jingdezhen, the ancient porcelain capital of China, Zhu Pei’s Imperial Kiln Museum rises from the earth like a series of clay vaults—structures both ancient and new.
Built with hand-crafted brick and local soil, it feels excavated rather than constructed, reconnecting architecture to the act of making.

Zhu Pei believes that architecture must be art—simple, unfinished, and alive.
His vaults are open to wind and rain, letting time and weather leave their traces.
For him, incompleteness is not imperfection but continuity—a dialogue between material and nature, between what continues to grow and what people still need to make of it.

Light enters through narrow gaps and hidden skylights, illuminating the space like fire within a kiln.
Visitors move through shadow, texture, and silence, discovering that the museum itself is not an object but an experience—a landscape of memory and renewal.

Zhu Pei’s architecture reminds us that the most visionary forms are never closed: they invite the world to finish them.