A tilted and fractured black box that emerges from a public square in the Chinese city of Harbin contains display areas dedicated to telling the story of war crimes committed during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

The Exhibition Hall of Crime Evidences is located on the site of the ruined barracks used by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which invaded a region of northeast China and Russia in 1931.
A team led by He Jingtang ? dean of the School of Architecture of South China University of Technology ? chose to position the main exhibition spaces below ground to reduce disruption to this sombre site.
The building was conceived as a "black box" in reference to the flight recorders used in aircraft to record and preserve flight information that can aid investigations into accidents or incidents.
In the case of the exhibition facility, the notion of the black box refers to the building as a space for revealing the atrocities committed by Unit 731, which was established in 1933 and headquartered in the city's Pinfang District.
Thousand of people were killed or used as subjects for medical experiments including the testing of biological and chemical weapons prior to the Japanese surrender in 1945, when the soldiers bombed and destroyed large sections of the base before fleeing.

"The concept of the 'black box' is basically an unearthing of the crimes committed by Unit 731," said the project team.
"We hoped to use the concept of black box as...