Shanghai's New Museum Resembles a Tentacled Sea Creature

The chambered nautilus is a sea critter that lives inside a logarithmic spiral, eats old crustacean exoskeletons, and reproduces with a prong of fused tentacles called a “spadix.” Here’s one right now, happily waving its 90-something feelers:

An animal this strange deserves attention, and now international architecture firm Perkins+Will has given it some with the newly finished Shanghai Natural History Museum. Though the bizarre structure incorporates all sorts of tableaux, its basic form is an ode to the nautilus, explain the architects: