Winning design for Taiwan art museum features sloped green roofs

Joe Shih Architects and Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop have won the international competition to design an art museum in Taoyuan, Taiwan.

Called "The Hill", the winning design for the Taoyuan Museum of Art features a pair of buildings with inclined green roofs on either side of a raised railway.

The back-to-back buildings form a "symbolical gate and hub" for the city of Taoyuan.

The building's slanting green roofs will be planted with trees and walkways will zig-zag across the between terraces used for displaying artworks and as viewing platforms.

Cut-out entryways and slots connect the outside with the gallery spaces under the sloped roofs, while a staircase and lift runs from top to bottom.

Cube-shaped pavilions built into the sloped facade will be available to artists to rent as temporary exhibition spaces or shops.

A lake with a curving bridge sits at the base of the smaller of the two buildings.

Bleachers and an outdoor theatre provide places for visitors to sit and watch performances in the art plaza and over the lake.

"The aim of was to create a place for entertainment, such as a theme park, which every visit leads to new discoveries," read the practice's statement.

"An inclined roof was designed to create a continuity with its environment, both with the community beside the museum, and the pond park."

The architects anticipate that the museum's construction will see a demand for artists' residences. The plans involve gradually redesigning the existing community beside the museum site to meet this demand by adapting the buildings into a grid and creating a small green plaza.

This is not the first hill-themed cultural centre to be recently unveiled. BIG's masterplan for the EuropaCity tourism and leisure destination outside of Paris in France was themed around "rolling hills".

Several of the eight winning designs for buildings in the development riffed on the concept, including UNStudio's cinema complex topped with green stepped terraces, and a hotel by Franklin Azzi Architecture designed to look like a grass-covered mountain peak.

BIG also teamed up with Google in California to design a campus office with ramped green roofs traversed by cycle paths and walkways.

Project credits:

Name: Taoyuan Museum of Art
Location: Taoyuan, Taiwan
Year: 2018
Design: Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop and Joe Shih Architects
Urban design: THR ARTECH
Engineering: Ove Arup & Partners Japan Limited
Consultants: Nagata Acoustics, Izumi Okayasu Lightning Design