sanaA’s Campus of Interconnected Volumes
Taichung Green Museumbrary is taking shape with architecture by SANAA in collaboration with local firm Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners. First unveiled in 2013, the project at last has an opening date set for December 13th, 2025. Alongside this long-awaited announcement, the team has released new visualizations of the 58,000-square-meter complex, which integrates an art museum and public library into a single composition — all surrounded by the city’s expansive 67-hectare Central Park.
The project is SANAA’s largest cultural work to date and their first public building in Taiwan. It consists of eight low-profile, interlinked structures that gently settle into the landscape. The buildings are clad in glass and smooth metal panels and wrapped in a secondary skin of expanded aluminum mesh that appears suspended, catching light across the facade in changing patterns throughout the day.
Each volume is designed with a different scale and function, distributed horizontally to encourage movement between its programs without strict boundaries. This open spatial strategy underscores SANAA’s intention to prioritize a more fluid and communal public experience within institutions.
visualizations courtesy Cultural Affairs Bureau, Taichung City Government
Transparency, Permeability and sunLight
The Taichung Green Museumbrary is designed by SANAA and Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners to lift lightly from the ground. This allows for the breeze and natural light of the park to flow beneath and through. Broad, shaded plazas between and below the buildings create a porous interface with the surrounding landscape. Multiple entrances allow visitors to enter from all directions, reinforcing the building’s openness to the city.
The dual-layer facade of metal mesh over low-e glass and metal cladding produces a soft, luminous exterior that diffuses the sun and reinforces a sense of airiness. These quiet formal gestures are central to the so-called museumbrary’s identity as a place for slow engagement with art, literature, and learning.
the project opens in December 2025 as Taiwan’s first combined art museum and library
A Rooftop Forest and Park Integration
Atop the building, the rooftop Cultural Forest offers elevated views across the Central Park and city skyline. Designed as a continuation of the site’s landscape, the rooftop is accessible to the public and extends the building’s civic presence vertically. The garden reinforces the project’s central concept: a library in a park and a museum in a forest.
Within, the library will house over one million physical and digital resources. Exhibition spaces within the art museum have been configured to accommodate a wide range of media, scales, and curatorial approaches, including large installations and performance.
the building was designed by SANAA with local firm Ricky Liu & Associates
The opening of the Taichung Art Museum is marked by a major exhibition, ‘A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place,’ curated by Yi-Hsin Lai and an international team. Drawing from the museum’s collection and new commissions, the show explores relationships between human and non-human worlds, set in conversation with the building’s open architecture.
Highlights include site-specific installations by Adrien Tirtiaux and Seunghyun Moon, archival materials from The Little Prince, a kinetic kite piece by Joan Jonas, and new works by artists including Haegue Yang, Michael Lin, Chia-En Jao, and Myrlande Constant. The program also features performance and video by TAI Body Theatre and YiLab, and contributions from local publication White Fungus.
eight interconnected volumes are clad in glass and expanded metal mesh
By uniting an art museum and a public library in one horizontally connected structure, SANAA reconsiders how cultural institutions function in contemporary urban settings.
As Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa explain, ‘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 project’s lightweight and permeable vocabulary supports this ambition by blurring distinctions between spaces and softening transitions between indoors and outdoors. SANAA’s design situates the act of learning within the rhythms of everyday life and within the sensory immediacy of the surrounding park.
each volume floats above the ground to invite breezes and light into shaded public plazas
project info:
name: Taichung Green Museumbrary
architect: SANAA | @sanaa_jimusho, Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners | @rickyliu_architects
location: Taichung, Taiwan
completion: expected December 13th, 2025
previous coverage: September 2013
visualizations: courtesy Cultural Affairs Bureau, Taichung City Government
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