Walk into a museum clad in 14,000 square metres of black glass
The Black Pearl
A regional museum on the Ha Long waterfront, designed by the Spanish architect Salvador Perez Arroyo and built between 2012 and 2013.
Why it's unique
The building is the exhibit. Three black-clad blocks are joined by an overhead walkway, and the glass was chosen to do two jobs at once: mirror the limestone karsts standing in the bay behind it, and stand for the coal that the province's economy was built on.
It is a museum in a coal city that decided to be made of coal.
Before you go
It reads as a single black slab from the road and only resolves into three separate volumes once you are on the walkway between them, so walk the outside before you go in.
The reflectivity is the entire design idea and it fails completely under flat cloud. This is a building to see in sun or at dusk, and a grey afternoon is a wasted ticket.