A major new cultural facility has opened in Taichung, Taiwan, bringing together a metropolitan art museum and library in a bid to “bring together art, knowledge and nature.”

Known as the Taichung Green Museumbrary, the facility has been designed by the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese architecture practice SANAA.

The building – which is SANAA’s largest project to date – is home to the new Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library, and was designed in collaboration with Taiwan’s Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners. It is located in Taichung’s 67-hectare Central Park, within a decommissioned military airport.

The Taichung Green Museumbrary consists of eight interconnected structures spanning 58,016-square-metres: four for the Taichung Public Library, three housing the Taichung Art Museum and one to be used as offices. The eight structures of varying sizes are clad in high-performance low-emissivity glass or metal cladding, and then enveloped in an aluminium expanded metal mesh curtain façade, which was designed to give the building a sense of lightness and transparency.

The library hold 460,000 physical books, with around 40,000 art books on the fifth floor of the library, which is connected to the museum via the ‘culture forest’ roof.

“This integrated design reflects the museum and library’s vision of learning as a shared, living practice,” said Yi-Hsin Lai, director of Taichung Art Museum. “The integration of Taichung Art Museum with Taichung Public Library and the park has activated our thinking about the environment, culture, people and the city. With the inaugural exhibition and the special commissions, we not only combine artistic dialogues across generations and cultures, but also strive to fulfil the potential of an art museum to enter the everyday life of the city and its residents, as well as to inspire creativity and imagination.” 

“We have always hoped to create an open building that many people can easily participate in,” said Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Partners of SANAA. “Whether it is the museum providing visual learning through art or the library offering education through literature, combining the two to create a new multifaceted learning space is what we believe to be one of the main characteristics of this building. We have carefully considered how to gently link the two entities together to create a place that connects learning and communication for people.”