Fluid culture

What happens when a library and an art museum cease to be two separate institutions and become a single place? In an era where learning is increasingly hybrid – textual and experiential, physical and digital, individual and collective – cultural venues must also be rethought, and architecture can play a significant role here. We no longer need defined containers for separate disciplines, but spaces capable of generating unexpected encounters and cultural and social cross-pollination. Taking on this challenge is SANAA, the Japanese architectural studio founded by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. The studio has already developed remarkable experiments concerning spaces for culture and learning, from the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne to Bocconi University in Milan.

Their latest achievement is the Taichung Green Museumbrary, inaugurated in December 2025 in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest city. This is their largest cultural project to date: 58,000 square meters where the new Taichung Art Museum and the city’s public library coexist. It is the first institution in Taiwan to integrate these two functions into a single complex. The building stands on the northern edge of Central Park, a 67-hectare green area created from the conversion of a former military airport decommissioned in 2004. Eight interconnected volumes of varying sizes rise from the ground on pilotis, allowing the ground floor to open into a fluid sequence of shaded plazas, traversed by the wind and light of the park. There is no main entrance: one enters from every direction – from the city or the park – consistent with the principle of openness and accessibility that guides the entire project.

The double skin of the envelope – glass on the inside and expanded aluminum mesh on the outside – produces a translucent and iridescent surface, which lightens the built mass and blurs the boundary between inside and out. This is SANAA’s signature: transparency, lightness, dissolution of boundaries. Inside, exhibition halls, reading areas, and public spaces follow one another with varying heights and scales, generating a rhythm that does not separate but rather superimposes: art and knowledge, contemplation and study. These are the project’s “fusion spaces”: hybrid zones where a visit to an exhibition can lead to consulting a book, and vice versa, encouraging spontaneous encounters between visitors and diverse forms of culture. The Taichung Green Museumbrary is not simply a building that houses two institutions. It is a spatial experiment on how cultural places can function when they stop thinking of themselves as enclosures and begin to behave as environments to be traversed.