Taichung’s museum and library complex weaves together art, light and learning

Museumbrary. It’s not a nice word. I think the people behind Taiwan’s hybrid museum and library missed a trick in not using Liseum. But I guess the Athenians got there first, albeit with a different spelling.

You might wince at the coinage, but the thing itself is astonishing. The Taichung Green Museumbrary is a huge new public building in Central Park in Taichung, Taiwan’s second city. It looks as if the gods have scooped up a handful of building blocks and gathered them together in a sheer silver mesh jewellery bag in a park.

This is a substantial building (28,000 metres sq above ground) which seems to almost melt into the sky as the mesh acts as a veil. And it is a thing of absolute wonder. The $175mn structure was designed by Japanese architects SANAA, the much-acclaimed and much-awarded designers of the Louvre Lens and New York’s New Museum. They have made a specialism out of creating an almost ghostly architecture in which buildings are dematerialised, as if their slender columns and walls of glass couldn’t possibly support such scale. This is one of those.

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