On the northern edge of Taichung's Central Park, over a military airfield decommissioned in 2004, SANAA completes the Taichung Art Museum, the studio's first public building in Taiwan.
The Taichung Art Museum is one half of a hybrid the city calls the Green Museumbrary, a single facility that folds a contemporary art museum into a public library. It sits at the northern edge of Central Park, a 67-hectare green belt laid over a military airfield that Taichung decommissioned in 2004. SANAA, working with the local firm Ricky Liu & Associates, treats the brief less as two institutions than as one continuous public ground, where reading, looking, and walking are meant to run together.
From the park, the building reads as a loose cluster of faceted white volumes, eight in total, wrapped in expanded metal mesh and screened behind vertical glass fins. The mesh softens each edge to a silver haze; up close the walls turn semi-transparent, dissolving the mass SANAA has spent years learning to make disappear. Slender columns lift several of the boxes clear of the ground, opening shaded public rooms beneath, where a black timber-slatted soffit angles down toward the lawn and its scatter of pale, egg-shaped stones.
Inside, circulation is the real subject. A central atrium, built from the same lightweight mesh, pulls daylight deep into the section, and an oval is cut clean through the floor plates so that levels borrow light and sightlines from one another. A spiral ramp climbs through the void, linking galleries in a single unbroken sequence rather than stacking them into discrete floors. Balustrades are white mesh, floors are polished concrete, and the effect is of a room that keeps unfolding upward.
The galleries themselves hold their nerve: tall white walls, track lighting, clerestory light filtered through the mesh, roughly 40,000 square feet of it given over to postwar and contemporary Taiwanese work alongside international loans. The library answers in a warmer register, with oval acoustic clouds floating below the exposed services, low white shelving, pale wood reading tables, and chairs in yellow, red, and orange. Sky bridges and a roof-level cultural forest carry the galleries out into open air.
It opened in December 2025 with A Call of All Beings, an inaugural exhibition that takes the surrounding park as its starting point and gathers artists from more than twenty countries around the question of how a city might live alongside everything else. The theme suits the building. As SANAA's first public commission in Taiwan and its largest cultural project so far, the museum argues that transparency is not a finish but a civic position, a way of keeping the institution porous to the park, the city, and whoever wanders in.
