The building housing the TAM (Tsinghua Art Museum), designed by Mario Botta Architetti as a result of a competition project of 2002, is located in the Campus of the Tsinghua University in Beijing on a 16 000 sqm area.
The museum consists of a long parallelepiped placed between the rectorate building to the west and the Campus boundary road to the east: it is clad in horizontal bands of pink granite, smooth or split and is characterised by four exhibition levels and a big portico with huge columns facing the broad open space to the south.
The portico leads to the lobby, where a majestic staircase crosses the whole building lengthwise and leads to the upper exhibition floors.
The big central space created by the staircase is the distinctive feature and the heart of the building: a kind of spatial caesura that allows visitors to perceive the space between the ground floor and the ceiling, characterized by a grid of skylights that let natural light flood the last exhibition floor; it occupies the whole surface and can be divided in different rooms according to the exhibition programmes and paths.
In conclusion, in the Campus, the building gives a balanced relationship between the open spaces and the interiors: a covered plaza that generously welcomes the visitors.
