Taipei Museum of Art

The attempt in the New Taipei City Museum of Art competition is to find the essence of art and to materialize our notion of art; to redefine the meaning of art museum and to alter the way art museum functions; to organize a relationship between ourselves and the world around us. In addition to animate forms, we have manipulated the movement in order to induce the production of new urban opportunities. Our proposal is a synthesis of the different programmatic functions: art museum, park, footbridge, services in a flexible, versatile space.

Because the site is in the middle of a park our design approach is to not disconnect the park and to allow the pedestrian move to flow unrestricted. We connect the park from both sides of the museum building by carrying out the existing park alleys and bike-paths through the semi-outdoor park pavilions of pop-art, children’s and services programmatic functions and through the covered outdoor plaza-courtyard with lapidarium [outdoor sculpture exhibition and rock garden underneath the museum story] which serves as a continuation of the park.

The glass pavilions are open and have visual contact with the park and Da-han river. The new footbridge from Ying-ge train station is pedestrian access on the second level. When it gets inside the building, the footbridge is transformed into a distributing circulation spine. Practically we waste 0% square meters area for corridors. Programmatically the art museum complex is organized around the idea of the path of gradation and discoveries: a 3D spatial loop where first the users get interested in the covered outdoor plaza-courtyard-lapidarium, then they raise their expectations in the semi-outdoor pop-art pavilions and at the end, the users enjoy the euphoria in the Contemporary Fine Arts Museum on second and third mezzanine levels. The maze/loop scheme of interconnected around freight elevators galleries facilitates the separation of the exhibition galleries for maintenance and updates.