Ansteel Museum

To select a site for the museum, the designers visited the old sintering plant with a history of nearly 70 years and clearly felt its profound history of industrial production. The time-honored plant is filled up by four rows of massive sintering machines, which occupy the first three floors. These elements with a strong sense of industry and history forms a very impactful visual landscape, recording the process of industrialization from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In order to make the remains, which represent and record the history of China’s industrial development, core exhibits for visitors, the designers proposed a design concept, namely building a green ecosystem and showcasing industrial landscape, hoping to develop the project into a green ecological landscape for industrial exhibition.

The biggest design highlights of the museum is that the second sintering plant has been renovated, some spaces that can not be repaired on the west side of the plant have been removed, a blast furnace which is higher than 70 meters and has a history of about 100 years has been dismantled, relocated and reassembled, not only protecting the blast furnace, but also making it the museum’s most impressive industrial heritage landscape together with the plant and the old industrial equipment. On the principle of “restore the old and build the new as old”, the old industrial equipment in the former plant have been preserved, including the over 10m-long sintering machine production line, large freight elevator, and gantry crane, bringing a new life into the industrial landscape through exhibition and reflecting the green design concept for environmental protection and recycling.

The second major problem is that the industrial heritages are scattered throughout the plant, which covers an area of 24 square kilometers, though they are well preserved. The old industrial area is essentially a complicated, large-scale and intensively-developed ecological system. An integrated iron & steel theme park was later built to exhibit the industrial heritages in a centralized way.