A new civic landmark in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is being celebrated after Rocco Design Architects Associates (RDA)’s Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM) officially opened its doors to the public.

The 30,000-square-meter (323,000-square-foot) museum’s design pays homage to the Beijing Palace Museum, from which it drew 900 of its collection’s objects, relying on a vertical sequence of three stacked atria that reference Hong Kong’s dense urban landscape in order to draw visitors upwardly through an interior again based on the “spatial experience” of the Palace’s sequential courtyards.

The new building sits adjacent to the Cultural District’s Art Park and offers sweeping views of nearby Victoria Harbor. Museumgoers enter the structure through a pavilion that frames a “grand elevated plaza” in a nod to the gates of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Once inside, a spine-like central staircase connects the 7,800 square meters (84,000 square feet) of gallery space across three levels, oriented by a bronze-cast panel ceiling that provides an additional reference to the roof of the 600-year-old palace.

Natural light pours into the interior through a skylight placed above the central stair and escalator embankment core. A flexible 400-seat theater and ground-level restaurant complete the program. Finally, its inverted cube massing is beset with voids housing exterior terraces that coincide with the atria and are oriented to the east, south, and west, respectively.