As if compensating for the Shuinan area’s present state, SANAA founders Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa conceived their building as an urban microcosm: “a city,” in Nishizawa’s words, that is “a bit of a maze when you first visit, but when you come back, becomes easier to navigate.” Of course, a single building, even one totaling over 600,000 square feet, cannot make up for the lack of dense urban fabric—the intimate alleys, colorful night markets, snaking canals, and popular public squares—found in Taichung neighborhoods not far away. But the architects’ threading of public passages through and around the artfully arranged volumes nonetheless produces spatial conditions and programmatic juxtapositions that are surprising enough to keep things interesting for the visitor.

A pond is built from mirror-finished stainless steel. Photo © Iwan Baan

The majority of the volumes are lifted up on pilotis, opening up the building’s ground level to serve as a set of shaded, subtly graded plazas linking the park behind to the future neighborhood in front. Interspersed are entrances to various programmatic spaces—an escalator up to the main library lobby, a direct entrance to a children’s library, a twisting ramp to the museum galleries—and a set of round, one-story structures housing a shop, café, information booths, and a spiral stair down to underground spaces including an auditorium and a parking garage. Both the library and museum entries are accessed from an area that is enclosed in mesh; this space can be locked when the two institutions are closed, but the remainder of the ground floor will remain open 24 hours a day.

Plazas on the ground floor are connected to the park. Photo © Iwan Baan

Floating stairs and walkways link the library and museum. Photo © Iwan Baan

The building is officially called the Taichung Green Museumbrary—a portmanteau that sounds better in Chinese than English—and indeed its most distinctive programmatic element is that it co-locates the main branch of the Taichung Public Library system with the newly founded Taichung Art Museum. (Taichung has long been home to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, but until now did not have a municipal art museum.) In keeping with the possibilities suggested by this combination, SANAA, working with architect of record Ricky Liu & Associates, has not limited either museum or library to a single volume. Instead, galleries and reading rooms are each distributed across different volumes, and visitors move freely across the complex: there is almost always more than one way to get from point A to point B. On two of the building’s six floors, floating walkways link the library and museum, enabling you to cross between them midway through a visit. The uppermost walkway, on the fifth floor, brings you outdoors into a mesh-enclosed box crisscrossed by ramps and dubbed the “culture forest,” an expansive space that does not yet, but ought to, have places to sit and relax.

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A cylindrical volume among the collection of cubes (1) offers dramatic circulation spaces (2). Photos © Iwan Baan

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Elsewhere, sloping walkways encircle art in the inaugural installation. Photo © Iwan Baan

For Sejima, the library and museum offer “two different ways of learning,” and placing both together raises the possibility of the programs’ shaping each other—from exhibitions in which books could be borrowed or library functions incorporating artworks to broader ways of “expanding our thinking and imagination.” At present, there is not much evidence of this happening. The museum and library remain separate: the reading rooms and galleries, as currently programmed, don’t stray from the modes of operation and organization that we have all learned to expect from these institutions.

For now, more immediate concerns dominate. At the complex’s fanfare-filled opening in December, Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-Yen voiced the hope that the Museumbrary “makes the world see Taichung, and places Taichung on the world’s stage”—a comment in which one can detect both familiar civic boosterism and a Taiwan-specific desire for the international recognition that the island has long been denied in the realm of politics. Not surprisingly, the galleries, all vast, flexible boxes designed before the museum was founded, seem best suited to sensational, Instagram-friendly installations of the sort associated with the global art circuit; and the initial set of exhibitions, which brings together a dizzying array of work from around the world with a vaguely environmental theme, only furthers this impression. The scale of the galleries was a “big challenge,” says museum director Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai, and some of the loveliest works on display, including a set of paintings of the transformed landscape of central Taiwan by the artist Hung Tien-Yu, feel minuscule by comparison.

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Installation views of opening exhibitions at the Taichung Art Museum (3 & 4). Photos © Anpis Foto

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I preferred the library reading rooms, with their curtain-filtered windows, intimate nooks, and snaking SANAA–designed tables and benches. These are spaces that reward wandering: an unexpected staircase transports you to a hidden terrace, a small exhibition teaches you about the history of encyclopedias. It’s all impeccably stylish. Meeting areas are encased in curving walls of acrylic. The soft hum of air-conditioning emerges from registers embedded in the bookshelves. Yet, as with so much of SANAA’s work, the effect is gentle, tranquil, rather than precious. Somehow, these architects again and again manage to create uncommon, daring, ultra-designed things that are nonetheless comfortable and unpretentious. There is something important about this that is not easy to put a finger on. I suspect that it relates to a certain attitude toward form-making. SANAA rose to prominence during the era of starchitecture and its formal acrobatics, and now Sejima and Nishizawa too are sought out by clients around the world looking to build signature buildings—hence the commission in Taichung. And yet, even as the shimmering, diaphanous Museumbrary fulfills the demands imposed upon it—that it attract the attention of foreign media, establish the legitimacy of a new district, and so on—it does so without the self-importance common with starchitecture; that is, without naively presenting itself as radical either in its formal inventiveness or its capacity to engender cultural change.

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The digital hub (5) and reading area (6) of the Taichung Public Library feature snaking, SANAA-designed tables and benches. Photos © Iwan Baan

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Perhaps this is where the understated frankness of Sejima and Nishizawa’s work comes from: an acceptance of the limits of what form can do. Where they find agency to intervene in the world of their own accord is neither in big, brash gestures nor in obsessively resolved details. Instead, it is in subtle, calibrated moves—in providing ample space for chance encounters and discoveries in the reading rooms, in treating the ground level as an unrestricted public space, in holding open the possibility for institutional boundaries to one day be blurred.

Image courtesy SANAA

Image courtesy SANAA

Image courtesy SANAA