Situated at the hillside Relic Park in the Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center in Panyu District, the museum is designed to better protect the Kangling Mausoleum and display the unearthed cul-tural relics, showcase the over-2000-year history of Guangzhou, and add highlights to the city’s cultural branding. The planning and design of the Relic Park is based on building a cultural mauso-leum and creating a mausoleum’s culture, combines the history of the Southern Han Kingdom with the development of the times, gives the mausoleum new attributes: public, cultural, commemora-tive, and economical, and builds a modern ecological mausoleum showing Guangzhou's thousand-year history and culture.
In terms of planning, the museum refers to the architectural layout of TANG Dynasty and organizes the three courtyards, sunken courtyards, corridors and tile ridges in a symmetrical way. Through building enclosure, multi-level courtyards and flowing space is formed. The axis of the museum complex is parallel to the original spatial axis of Kangling Mausoleum, forming a unity of order.
Architects uses abstract techniques to extract traditional structural forms, so that both the inside and outside of the building can reflect the charm of ancient Tang-style buildings. The horizontal and vertical lines are extracted and applied in accordance with the proportional relationship of the an-cient buildings to achieve a highly unity of function and form.
The main building adopts dark gray glass curtain wall with dark red aluminum-alloy eaves. The large square and the building base are made of white granite, which is in sharp contrast with the dark gray main body, boosting ancient charm of Tang Dynasty and showing stable and restrained temperament of the building.