Pavilion planned at Palace Museum’s digital gallery

A pavilion of steel and glass is to be built outside Duanmen Digital Gallery at the southern entrance to Beijing’s Palace Museum, Beijing Youth Daily has reported.

The structure will provide shelter in bad weather and exclude winter winds, while “the design is a perfect combination of modern technology and classical style”, according to information released by Beijing Architectural Design Institute of China Construction Corp.

Blueprints show the pavilion will be 8 meters long, 2.5 meters wide and 5.9 meters high, and will comprise a steel frame encased in curtain glass walls. Each pane of glass will be 5.4 meters by 95 centimeters.

Construction on the new building, which will stand entirely separate from Duanmen, will start soon, but in the meantime, the blueprints could be modified, the institute said.

Duanmen dates back to 1420 and was a main entrance to the Forbidden City during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

In 2015, the building was transformed into a digital gallery, which use virtual reality and other technology to display ancient relics too old and fragile for real exhibitions, according to Shan Jixiang, director of the Palace Museum.

Zhang Yi contributed to this story.