project: NTCArt Museum Competition

location: Taipei City, Taiwan

date: summer 2012

size: 50,000 sq. meter

status: Speculative

design: Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Eric Kahn & Russell Thomsen (Idea Office), Heather Flood (Flab)

project team: Carmelia Chang, Mahyoub Aranki

 

The New Taipei City Museum of Art (NTCArt) is a place where art, life and culture meet. Contrary to the conventional museum as an insular institution that isolates art from the life of the city surrounding it, the NTCArt seeks to generate new experiences and understandings by merging art, recreation and tourism as a compelling set of convergences. Rather than museum as a collector or storehouse of culture, the NTCArt will be a people’s art museum, a generator of culture and lifestyle that comes from the convergence of art and life.

The architecture of the new building seeks to generate a new museum sense by synthesizing the goals stated in the brief. Both at once a common ground where diverse conditions meet and interact, it is also a more relaxed and ambient model, offering moments of formality and informality. Two instincts inform the design: the calligraphic gesture and a relaxed figuration. Calligraphy is a writing form with an extensive history and highly developed technique, both disciplined and beautifully fluid at the same time. The relaxed figure works as a means for creating particular moments within the larger forms of the building that simply allow it to do what it needs to an effortless way. That is, the relaxation of the more rigid, formal typology allows for unique moments without compromising the coherence of the larger whole.

Innovative architecture alone does not suffice to make up the rich diversity mandated by the brief. The new museum is deployed into the site and landscape in order to capitalize on the existing activities, circulation routes and surroundings by creating interfaces, convergences and hybrids. The building as a large, monolithic figure would never be able to do that. Instead, our building, made up of calligraphic figures that twist, turn and overlay across the horizontal landscape of the site, is nimbly able to interact with a variety of conditions, from roadways, tram station and bike paths. The relaxed posture enables the visitor to move between indoor and outdoor spaces, both equally compelling in the ways they might exhibit art as it coexists with life.

The overall organization of the NTCArt is non-hierarchical, dispersed, informal, and opportunistic. It is not composed as a single narrative nor is it an abstract space for the storage and display of art. Rather the architecture visibly intends to foster and shape multiple forms of the convergence of art and life, effectively enabling a new lifestyle. As opposed to the more rigid, institutional model of museum as a precisely choreographed experience, our building allows for a different range of possible experiences. Multiple entrances, paths and experiences interact to produce the new. It is no longer important that viewers see the entire collection from one end to the other, but rather that they can have a series of satisfying experiences each time they visit the museum. It is a place of prompts, not directives, a place one returns to over and over without preconception or rote.

The calligraphic is essentially a series of lines or strokes that dance across the grounds of the site, changing direction, intersecting, converging and diverging. These multiple figures both hug the landscape at intimate moments and fly above it to create shaded outdoor spaces for gathering and exhibition. The various segments of the figures house the storage wing and administrative offices discretely, while restaurants, bookstores, rest areas and support facilities punctuate the varied spaces for exhibition. The Children’s Museum is located in the southwest quadrant of the site as a smaller, more discrete figure, while the administrative office occupy a figure to the southeast.

The undulations of the different building figures generate a variety of outdoor spaces connected by a network of paths and greens. The landscape has been organized as a series of textures that correspond to places and uses throughout the site. Not unlike a golf course, the rough is planted with long grasses and makes up the larger, more feral surroundings of the site. An archipelago of flat greens are outdoor areas that make up the venue for the Hall of Fame artists. Meandering pedestrian paths, longer and more fluid bike paths move through rough stone hardscapes and water elements. The existing roadway that bisects the site cuts into the earth, effectively passing beneath the buildings and creating a new, higher speed experience of the museum without interrupting it. A single floor underground parking garage removes parked vehicles from the landscape, providing easy and quick access for visitors to site and museum above.