China Plans “Drive Thru” Museum
Filed Under: Humor on October 21, 2009
No word on whether it will include a McDonald’s. The growing trend in China is car ownership. Exemplifying this is the new plan for a “drive through” museum, which will be called the Nanjing Automotive Museum. It’s a private enterprise, not a government one, but I just have to wonder what the point is.
I can understand why some nature parks are drive through. Sometimes animals that are nice to look at will eat people. Other times, they step on us. That doesn’t mean we don’t like to look at them.
But a regular museum? Why do you need to drive through that?
Anyway, the design for the museum is pretty goofy too. Look at the parking stalls that appear to be on a forty-five degree downward angle. Hope that’s not the handicapped stall…
The actual exhibits are, in the main, not visible from the car, to be fair. The idea is to drive your car up the museum’s ramps (circling around it), park on the roof, and then walk down through the exhibits. At the bottom, you take an elevator back to the roof and your parked car.
While the idea is kind of novel (though it seems like any parking garage to me, just without the “garage” bit), it also looks like a huge waste of energy. How many cars will visit the thing, drive all the way up it (for no reason) and then all the way back down? Isn’t that kind of pointless?
Not that I can throw rocks, living in the glass house of energy extravagance we call America. I hope there’s at least some cool stuff in this museum, anyway. Something other than the world’s largest ball of string or smallest goat or whatever, that is.
