New Taipei City Government | Taipei, Taiwan(ROC) 2011

Much like many of the works it is designed to house, this proposal for the Taipei Museum of Art is a building whose simple, clear external form in fact contains a wealth of intrigue, discovery and complexity. The museum is defined as a constellation of ‘rooms’, each legible as autonomous buildings in their own right, and each housing key components of the museum’s programme. The constellation is arranged outwardly as a unified whole – a conventional monolithic squared shape – but inwardly as an organic and varied topography of fissure, niche, bulge, flexure and contortion thanks the gaps between each structure.

These gaps, combined with a series of upper level loggia spaces, are the only interruptions to the external form of the building, defining to access routes into and through the museum – democratic, loose spaces – and allowing for views of the surrounding city.