Architectural designer Qingmai Ni conceived and developed Embodied Viewing: An Immersive Extension for Cooper Hewitt, an independent architectural proposal that received a Silver award. The recognition went to an idea that treats a museum extension less as a building and more as something you move through and are changed by.
The project is an independent architectural proposal: Ni developed it on their own initiative, as a design study aimed at a real institution. Ni imagines a layered, cloud-like structure settling above and around the Carnegie Mansion, the Cooper Hewitt’s home in New York, wrapping the historic building rather than replacing any part of it. The new structure reads as an addition that responds to the mansion’s scale and presence. Visitors encounter objects overhead, along circulation routes, within spatial sequences that unfold as they walk, and through viewpoints that keep shifting rather than settling into a fixed frame. The mansion stays intact and legible underneath.
Most museums separate the act of looking from the act of moving: you walk to a gallery, then you stand still and look. Ni’s proposal collapses that separation. Viewing and moving happen at the same time, and the sequence in which a visitor passes through the building becomes part of how they read an object. Here, the building itself carries some of the interpretive weight that labels and wall text usually do. Movement, circulation, viewing angle, and transparency become tools an exhibition designer uses, much like a curator uses sequence and juxtaposition in a conventional gallery.
Most museums separate the act of looking from the act of moving: you walk to a gallery, then you stand still and look.
A handful of specific elements carry that idea through the design. An engagement core anchors the plan and gives the building a center that visitors keep returning to from different levels and angles. An interaction wall gives them something to touch and respond to directly. A skyline staircase threads between levels, pulling people upward through the layered structure instead of routing them down a single hallway. Rooftop spaces push part of the exhibition outside the enclosed floor plans museums default to, folding changing light, weather, and the city itself into what’s on view.
Here, the building itself carries some of the interpretive weight that labels and wall text usually do.
Getting from concept to finished proposal meant testing the idea at several different scales. Ni worked through architectural drawings, building sections, and spatial studies before moving into renderings, and eventually built a physical model out of wood, cardboard, and mesh. The model did work the drawings alone couldn’t. It let Ni check how a lightweight new enclosure would actually sit against the mass of the existing mansion, where the two structures would need to negotiate with each other, and how a person walking through the layered circulation would experience the transitions between one level and the next. Those are details that tend to flatten out on paper and only show up once something exists in three dimensions.
Ni’s broader design practice explores how movement, spatial sequencing, and visual perception shape how people experience architecture. Embodied Viewing develops these interests through the relationship between the body, exhibited objects, and space, using circulation and shifting viewpoints to turn the museum visit into an active spatial experience. Rather than treating architecture as a static container for display, the proposal positions architecture itself as part of how visitors encounter and interpret what is exhibited.
The MUSE Awards cover categories across advertising, design, and experiential work from around the world, and Experiential & Immersive – Exhibition Experience is a narrow one, built for projects that rethink how people occupy space rather than simply decorate it. The Silver recognition highlights the strength of Embodied Viewing as an architectural concept developed through drawings, renderings, and physical modeling rather than a completed building. The case for it exists entirely in drawings, renderings, and a physical model, and it held up on that basis alone. That’s a specific kind of validation: recognition for a way of thinking about museum architecture, ahead of any building that might eventually prove it out.
That’s a specific kind of validation: recognition for a way of thinking about museum architecture, ahead of any building that might eventually prove it out.
