NEW TAIPEI CITY ART MUSEUM
Program: 51,000sqm Contemporary Art Museum, Children’s Museum, and Amenities
Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan
Year:  2011
Status:  Competition
The New Taipei City Art Museum is conceived as the architectural expression of a dynamic and fluid lifestyle/art experience. It is not only a museum of contemporary art; it is an architectural and civic landmark that shapes the visual and spatial experience of the visitors to the museum, the users of the park it inhabits, and the citizens of the city it represents. It is a dynamic building that is inherently connected to the identity of New Taipei City, and furthermore augments that identity through its iconic presence.

The design of the museum challenges the conventional notion of a museum as a centralized network of enclosed galleries each to be experienced in serial fashion, but instead proposes a gradient network of continuously connected and articulated spaces with no start and no end. The programs of both the Contemporary Art Museum and the Children’s Museum are arranged as closed loops of continuous programmatic experience. Each of the loops has been deformed into a three dimensional helicoidal knot which peels away from the ground and cantilevers out to sculpt dramatic interior gallery spaces and define partially enclosed outdoor exhibition spaces. The two knots nest within one another, creating programmatic tangencies articulated by peeling transitions and surfaces where they overlap, thus opening the closed condition of the two loops into a single continuous spatial network.