photos by Studio Millspace, drone operated by Hao-Jan Chang The site is located in the center of Tainan -the old capital of Taiwan- which is concentrated with many shops and cultural institutions. The project was won through an open competition, and is a 22,596㎡ art museum to be built on top of an existing underground parking lot, which serves the surrounding area.
When walking around the site during the initial site visit, my first concern was that in this city where the buildings are so densely built up, there was no park space for relaxation serving the citizens. This is where I thought of a building typology that combines the building with a park.
It would be ideal, to be able to do something similar to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, where groups of galleries are spotted throughout a beautiful landscape, but the site is rather tight at only 24,503㎡, making it impossible to realize. On the other hand, unlike Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum, where park spaces are just located on top of the museum, I thought of a building typology where the art museum and the activities of the park are not separate, but rather an integrated whole, make it possible to freely go out into the park from within the museum, or have park visitors, without realizing it, enter and enjoy the museum. Various sizes of galleries that are shifted and stacked atop one another, like building blocks, create roof tops that become interconnected park spaces, while the entrances of the museum are located in the spaces between the individual galleries.
If a building takes a square form, the sense of direction and frontage becomes too strong, especially in this case, and by taking a hint from the five-petal Phoenix Blossom – the symbolic flower of Tainan – I thought of a large pentagon-shaped frame that encompasses the gallery boxes while this also weakens the sense of main frontage by facing in all directions, and allowing visitors to approach from many different directions. Since Tainan has strong solar radiation all throughout the year, in order to create shading for the entire building, we are developing “Fractal Shading”, together with Professor Satoshi Sakai of Kyoto University. He originally developed a plastic pergola type of fractal shading, and together with Professor Sakai we are now developing a large scale metal version to shade the whole building.