Like dinosaur eggs in the sand: The Pterosaur Museum was built to grow in the Gobi Desert.

How architects work with the harsh environment to create a sustainable building in a place where fossils are found. The silver colored Hami Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space base on Mars. Viewed from above, it looks like a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Located in the Gobi Desert in northwest China, this new tourist attraction displays hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs.

Viewed from afar, the silver-colored Hummy Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space station on Mars. Viewed from above, it looks like a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Located in the Gobi Desert in northwest China, this new tourist attraction displays hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs. But far from reflecting prehistoric exhibitions, this building itself is an example of modern architecture.

Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and extensive solar farms, the museum can operate sustainably while tolerating a very harsh environment.

Hami region is notorious for its scorching summers. Air temperatures can exceed 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit), while surface temperatures can reach 80 degrees Celsius, said Wang Xiaolin, director of the museum and a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. According to Xiaolin, who has been drilling at Hami for 20 years, strong winds and sandstorms often terrorize the area.

Despite the scary conditions, it is important from a scientific point of view to build a museum in this area because it is a place where fossils are buried and found, says Xiaolin. "Keeping fossils local protects fragile artifacts and allows visitors to see them in their geological context," he adds.

Visitors to the five exhibition halls can expect to see precious fossils unearthed by the Xiaolin team, including one that has preserved the upper and lower jaws, as well as the soft-tissue structures of the crown of a pterosaur that roamed the area about 130 meters ago.

Huai Kaifeng, an architect at Beijing-based Tournscape, which designed the project, says most of the 8,000-square-meter museum is built 8 meters above ground, where the temperature is much lower, which helps it stay cool in the summer. In winter, when the temperature drops below -20 degrees Celsius, the design helps the museum stay warm.

Wang Yujia, a landscape architect and associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US who is not involved in the project, says that being mostly underground, with seven above-ground entrances, allows the museum to use its energy as efficiently as possible. Most of it is able to avoid direct exposure to wind, sand, and solar heat, and temperatures fluctuate greatly between day and night in the desert. "All this means is that you need much, much less air conditioning," says Yujia.

Although air conditioning is installed for backup, the museum has natural ventilation shafts that allow cool air to sink in and warm air to rise and escape. According to Turenscape estimates, the museum can reduce its electricity consumption in air conditioning by 94% compared to its above-ground counterpart. This is equivalent to saving 223,421 kWh of electricity per year, enough to power an average UK home for 89 years.

But the underground space in the desert presented another challenge for the architects: lighting. The team used giant, translucent ceiling-to-floor funnels to let in maximum natural light. According to Turenscape, these structures reduce the museum's need for artificial lighting by nearly 50 percent, saving 84,672 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.

The museum was one of the last projects completed by the late Chinese architect Kongjian Yu, the founder of Turnscape. Yu was the brain behind China's "sponge cities," a concept that uses nature to prevent flooding in urban areas.

The museum has its own small electricity grid, which has a solar farm and batteries for energy storage. The solar farm is about 1 km from the museum, with a design that looks like a pterosaur from above. Huai says it is expected to generate more than 22.4 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, enough to meet the museum's own demand. He notes that the museum is still connected to the electricity grid of the supporting city to ensure its energy security.

The museum is also connected to the Hami water supply network, but has an on-site recycling system to collect, process and reuse its gray water.

"The water here in the Gobi is precious," says Xiaolin.

For Yujia, the museum is a good example of how a building can be designed to adapt to its natural environment rather than fight against it.

Although technology enables people to build luxury resorts in the desert and keep them cool, such projects require enormous amounts of energy and resources, he says.

It makes sense to work as much as possible with the existing environmental conditions, rather than relying entirely on technology to isolate the building from them.

Examples include a floating exhibition stand built in Rotterdam to address rising sea levels, a giant park with tilted ground in Bangkok to prevent urban flooding, and a snail shell-shaped house in Iran to help keep its residents cool.

This concept is important for dry areas. "These places are not cities, you don't necessarily have the basic infrastructure or the resources you want, even if you spend money, because money is not magic," Yujia adds.

Designing buildings and parks to combat natural disasters has been an enduring theme throughout Yu's career, and for Jiinyi Hwang, principal architect of Turenscape, the museum is no exception.

"Our world is drying up. Deserts and dry areas are expanding. Cities are heating up. "If we continue to design with the same assumptions—sealed boxes, glass facades, and mechanical climate control—we're consuming the same resources that these landscapes cannot spare," says Huang.