The Hanoi Museum in Vietnam

As part of the thousand-year celebrations of the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, the Hanoi Museum was inaugurated. The architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners had won the international competition for the building in 2005 and realized it within two years. The 30,000-square-meter museum is integrated into a specially designed park with large water surfaces, in which visitors can view exhibits from Hanoi's history and replicated traditional Vietnamese villages as soon as they enter the museum landscape. From this park, there are accesses to the museum at all four points of the compass. In the interior of the square building, a circular open area in the foyer connects the entrance level with the three upper exhibition levels. These protrude outwards increasingly towards the top like tiered terraces, forming an inverted pyramid. For visitors this creates the impression of floating over the landscape when looking out of the window.