On 13 December 2025, Taichung, Taiwan, unveiled a major cultural landmark that rethinks how public institutions can serve a city. The Taichung Green Museumbrary, designed by the Japanese architectural firm SANAA in collaboration with Taiwanese practice Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners, opened to the public as a hybrid of metropolitan art museum and central public library. This project marks SANAA’s first public building in Taiwan and stands as one of the firm’s largest cultural works to date, spanning roughly 58,000 m² on the northern edge of Taichung’s Central Park.
Taichung Green Museumbrary: Taiwan’s New Cultural Landmark by SANAA
Located within the expansive 67-hectare Central Park, itself part of the former Shuinan Trade and Economic Park, the building aims to dissolve the boundaries between art, literature, architecture, and nature. SANAA’s guiding concept was described as “a library in a park and an art museum in a forest,” reflecting a deliberate integration of cultural space with the surrounding green landscape.
The complex is composed of eight interconnected volumes of varying sizes. These volumes are clad in high-performance glass and metal and wrapped in an outer expanded aluminum mesh façade that has a silvery, veil-like quality. This dual-layer façade filters sunlight, supports natural ventilation, and creates a sense of transparency and lightness, visually softening the building’s presence and linking it to the park’s greenery.
Within this open framework, traditional institutional boundaries are deliberately blurred. Visitors can move freely between the Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library, passing through shared lounges, co-working zones, mezzanines, and informal gathering areas. Public access is encouraged from multiple points around the ground level, where shaded plazas provide meeting points and extend the park’s landscape into the building itself.
The art museum is a 27-meter-high central atrium, one of the tallest exhibition spaces in Taiwan, with a spiraling ramp guiding visitors through five gallery halls with ceilings that vary from intimate to monumental.
The inaugural exhibition, A Call of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place, features site-responsive works by over seventy artists from around the world, including commissioned installations by Haegue Yang and Michael Lin, addressing themes of ecology, community, and interspecies coexistence.
Opposite the museum’s dynamic spatiality, the library offers a mix of dedicated reading spaces from children’s corners to teen zones and digital hubs configured to support study, relaxation, and exploration. Designed to house over one million physical and digital resources, it embodies SANAA’s vision of an inclusive cultural environment where learning and leisure intersect.
Cultural Forest and Skybridge Over Central Park
Above the main facility, the “Cultural Forest” serves as a semi-outdoor oasis, linking the two major programs and offering panoramic views over Central Park and the Taichung skyline. A circular skybridge connects the museum and library at this level, encouraging visitors to wander and discover spaces that feel both communal and quietly secluded.
The Taichung Green Museumbrary stands out for its fluid circulation and openness. Pathways wind between the volumes, stairs and bridges create serendipitous moments of encounter, and interior spaces are designed to engage with daylight and greenery at every turn. The elevated structure, combined with the mesh “veil,” reinforces a sense of immersion with the outdoors while maintaining comfortable, well-lit interior spaces.
The completion of this project introduces an innovative cultural hub for Taichung’s residents and visitors and positions the city as a growing destination on the global cultural map. By fully integrating an art museum and public library into a single, porous, and expressive architectural landscape, SANAA and its collaborators have created a place that invites people to explore, pause, and connect with art and books, and with each other and the world outside.
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