The Taichung Green Museumbrary:

After a 12-year process spanning three mayoral administrations, the Taichung Green Museumbrary officially opened in December 2025 at the northern edge of Central Park in the Shuinan Economic and Trade Park. It was designed by the architectural firm SANAA—led by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa—in collaboration with Taiwanese architect Ricky Liu.

Translucent cubes floating above the greenery

Set in the park, the Green Museumbrary combines the functions of an art museum and a library across eight volumes (interior spaces enclosed by buildings). Four belong to the library and three the museum, while one contains administrative offices. There are also shared spaces used by both institutions.

The architecture showcases SANAA’s signature design vocabulary: transparency, lightness, negative space, ambiguity, fluidity, and openness.

A SANAA team jointly organized by Ryue Nishizawa (right) and Kazuyo Sejima (left) was responsible for the architectural design. The building bears SANAA’s signature design vocabulary of transparency, lightness, negative space, ambiguity, fluidity, and openness. (photo by Lily Chen, courtesy of Taichung Art Museum)

Most of the giant silvery-white volumes rise high above the ground, seeming to float. Their surfaces are wrapped in silver-gray expanded aluminum mesh, draping the architecture in a light, gauzy veil. This not only blurs the boundary between inside and out, but also instantly softens the buildings’ bulky mass.

The lobby, with multiple entrances and exits, is visitors’ first point of arrival. At its center, a stainless-steel reflecting pool 16 meters in diameter mirrors the greenery and daylight outside while helping regulate the microclimate. Beside it is a circular glass information desk nicknamed the “Bubble House” by staff, along with silver drop-shaped chairs designed by SANAA staff. These circles large and small give the space a cool, airy grace, evoking “pearls, large and small, falling on a jade plate”—a phrase composed by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi to describe the pleasing, crisp sound of the Chinese pipa lute.

The lobby’s stainless-steel reflecting pool helps regulate the microclimate.

Blurring the boundaries between spaces

The requirement that the Green Museumbrary combine an art museum and a library found a natural match in the SANAA team, as the firm has long been adept at blurring boundaries.

It may seem at first glance that art museums and libraries operate according to very different principles: The former champions new ways of imagining and creating, while the latter focuses on systematizing and transmitting information. “Yet both, in fact, cultivate people’s ability to think and create, as well as their aesthetic sensibility,” says Tseng Hui-chun, director of the Taichung Public Library.

“We had to focus on finding a new model of collaboration that could fulfill the missions of both institutions,” says Nicole Yi-hsin Lai, director of the Taichung Art Museum.

Taichung Art Museum Director Nicole Yi-hsin Lai (left) and Taichung Public Library Director Tseng Hui-chun (right) sought common ground between the institutions’ differing operating logic, creating a new form of collaboration.

The SANAA team used spatial design to break down the barriers between the two institutions. Transparent glass opens sightlines between them, while ambiguous corridors with no clearly prescribed route and connections on the first, second, and fifth floors often lead visitors, almost without their realizing it, into the other establishment.

In response to the building’s distinctive form, the library has also placed art books in its fifth-floor reading room. The museum, for its part, also displayed texts and manuscripts in its inaugural exhibition, A Call of All Beings, as a preliminary acknowledgement of the institutions’ shared complex.

Connecting the two institutions is the fifth-floor semi-outdoor rooftop garden known as the “Cultural Forest.” It is hosting Vietnamese artist Tuan Mami’s Vietnamese Immigrating Garden Project – Borderless Garden, a platform for social engagement and an even more organic experiment in integration.

The themed book exhibition “A Stroll in the Forest,” held in the library’s main hall located on the third floor, was jointly curated by picture-book author Chuang Shih-ying and illustrator Chou Chun-sheng (aka Page Tsou). It makes creative use of the SANAA team’s curved display tables and flower-shaped chairs, set off by grass-green carpeting, to turn the library into a forest for reading.

Mami, working at the museum’s invitation, planted the garden with many herbs and other edible plants from Vietnam that Vietnamese communities in Taiwan rely on. Books on Vietnamese culture are displayed alongside the garden. A “seed library” displays seeds, pickled foods, and dried plants, while the fifth-floor reading area also features books on multiculturalism and immigration. Local Vietnamese communities will also be invited to meet and connect there. The space will also host art and reading activities.

Visitors may deliberately enter the art museum only to find themselves unexpectedly inspired by the knowledge in its texts; or they may originally choose to walk into the library only to feel the stirrings of a desire for art. The distinctive setting heightens both inspiration and discovery. Only at the Green Museumbrary can one experience this dual allure of books and art brought together in harmony.

The rooftop “Cultural Forest” is hosting Vietnamese artist Tuan Mami’s Vietnamese Immigrating Garden Project – Borderless Garden, a platform for social engagement that brings together the distinctive features of the two institutions.