SANAA-Designed Taichung Green Museumbrary Opens
The Taichung Green Museumbrary—its name referring to the fact it is home to the both new Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library—opened to the public on December 13, 2025. It is the largest cultural project to date designed by SANAA, the Japanese firm of Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.
In addition to being SANAA's largest cultural building, it is the firm's first building in Taiwan, done in collaboration with Taipei's Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners. In numbers, the building that combines a municipal art museum and public library totals approximately 58,000 square meters (625,000 square feet). Sited on the northern edge of Taichung Central Park, the building is articulated as eight interconnected glass-and-metal volumes wrapped in an outer layer of aluminum expanded metal mesh.
SANAA conceptualized the building as “a library in a park and an art museum in a forest.” The mesh-wrapped volumes are lifted to allow access, light, and breezes into and through the building. Filtered views of Central Park through the mesh facades and from a rooftop “Culture Forest” reinforce the concept, though the architects also strove to break down the “traditional boundaries between museums and libraries,” per the Museumbrary, “creating an open, inclusive environment where exhibitions and reading converge.” Once inside the building, visitors can move freely between the library and museum, as one might expect from a building whose name merges the two typologies, and also use “fusion spaces” that blend activities and “encourage spontaneous encounters between visitors and culture.”
“We have always hoped to create an open building that many people can easily participate in. 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.”
The art museum is oriented about a 27-meter (88-foot) tall atrium with ramps that connect the different floors and the museum's five exhibition rooms, which total 3,685 m2 (39,665 sf) and range in height from 4 meters (13 feet) to 10.9 meters (36 feet). The Taichung Art Museum opens with A Call of All Beings/ See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place, an exhibition that “draws inspiration from the natural and urban landscape surrounding the museum, interweaving architectural openness with diverse artistic perspectives across generations.” The museum's opening also unveils its first “Art Commissions in Public Space,” including Haegue Yang's Liquid Votive – Tree Shade Triad in the atrium.
The other part of the Taichung Green Museumbrary, the Taichung Public Library, consists of a lobby, a teenager reading area, a children's reading area, a periodicals and newspaper room, the Digital HUB, and numerous reading areas. The last are equipped with sun-shading curtains that block direct sunlight but also maintain views of the park in which its situated.
