Kengo Kuma have turned the traditional idea of museum architecture on its head with their latest design: a jungle-inspired complex set inside an enormous cave.

The Museum of Indigenous Knowledge will sit in the heart of an industrial district of Manila. Visitors will step off the street through a cavernous rocky arch covered in tropical plants and rock. Once inside this large void, they will be able to walk towards a central atrium through a wild environment of jungle, streams, ravines, ponds and waterfalls. These replicate the mountainous valleys where the indigenous people of the Philippines once sought refuge following the arrival of Spanish colonisers.

Explaining the concept of the entrance design, Javier Villar Ruiz, a partner at Kengo Kuma, said: “[After] talking with the curators and visiting sites where these cultures are still a reality, we understood that these [indigenous] peoples – and all those artefacts that bear witness to the way they live, their experience of the world and their beliefs – cannot be understood without the context and environment where they have developed throughout the centuries. This is why we abandoned the conventional idea of the museum as a container where aliened content is simply displayed and observed.”

After the dramatic entrance space, the atrium will be more conventionally designed, containing shops and restaurants and escalators leading to five gallery floors. These will exhibit artefacts giving visitors an experience of the Philippines' cultural and religious heritage, starting from the Neolithic age.

According to Ruiz, those inside will discover “the fake nature of the topography experienced moments ago, like suddenly entering a retro scene from a theatre.”

He added: “[This] idea of composing architecture from a series of fake elements in order to orchestrate a new whole scenography is for us a very exciting new way to rethink how a museum can be.”

A completion date for the project has yet to be revealed.