A video of the Qizhong Forest Sports City Tennis Center in Shanghai is turning heads, showing eight petal-shaped steel panels sliding together and locking into place like a camera shutter or a spaceship hatch. The whole roof closes in about eight minutes. Its design was inspired by the magnolia, Shanghai's official city flower, and it was created by Japanese architect Mitsuru Senda. The arena opened in 2005 as part of a larger sports complex, and it has hosted the Tennis Masters Cup and later the Shanghai Masters.

Viewers often compare it with Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened in 2017 and uses a similar eight-petal retractable roof that creates the same iris-like effect when it opens or closes. The Shanghai roof came more than a decade earlier, and it lets the arena host both indoor and outdoor tennis, depending on the weather. The date of the clip going around online has not been confirmed, but the structure itself has long been one of the city's best-known landmarks. Seeing it close, it's easy to understand why people keep calling it a piece of engineering that looks like science fiction.