A pair of museums designed by Steven Holl Architects will anchor a new cultural district in the Eco-City area of Tianjin. Holl envisions the two museums—one dedicated to ecology and the other to city planning—as complementary buildings, both in terms of their missions and their architectural forms.

A collaboration between the governments of China and Singapore, Tianjin Eco-City is being built on a site in the Binhai New Area that had been a polluted salt pan 25 miles from the center of Tianjin. The 11.5-square-mile-project, which aims to be a model of sustainable development, will have a population of 350,000 when it is completed around 2020. Tianjin is one of the fastest growing cities in China and is developing the Binhai New Area as a second urban core, much as Shanghai has built the Pudong area as a sibling to its historic core in Puxi. Located 95 miles southeast of Beijing, Tianjin is now connected to the capital by a high-speed train that takes just 30 minutes to zip from one city to another.