On September 30, 2025, the internationally renowned SANAA architectural firm officially released the latest photos of the Taichung Green Museumbrary—a comprehensive cultural facility designed by the firm. As SANAA’s largest-scale cultural project to date, it is also regarded as one of the most significant cultural landmarks in Taichung City, Taiwan Province, China, in 2025. Scheduled to open to the public on December 13, 2025, the facility is set to bring brand-new cultural experiences to Taichung citizens and global visitors alike.
The Taichung Green Museumbrary is situated on the north side of Taichung Central Park, within the 254-hectare Shuizhu Economic and Trade Park. The Central Park itself covers an area of 67 hectares, and this prime location has allowed the building to be deeply integrated with natural landscapes from the very beginning of its planning. SANAA has proposed the core design concept of “a library in the park, an art museum in the forest” for the project, aiming to break the sense of enclosure of traditional cultural buildings and achieve a seamless integration between cultural spaces and the natural environment. From the newly released photos, it is clear that the project consists of eight interconnected buildings, each with distinct functions. All buildings are elevated above the ground; this raised design not only allows natural light to penetrate freely into the shaded square at the base of the buildings but also enables the breeze from the park to circulate unobstructed. It creates a transparent and open atmosphere on the site while providing visitors with access routes from all directions, enhancing the building’s openness to the city. This innovative design has also drawn attention in the latest architecture news, as it sets a new benchmark for the integration of cultural architecture with urban natural environments.
In terms of spatial functions and design details, the Taichung Green Museumbrary embodies SANAA’s consistent pursuit of a “smooth public experience.” The eight buildings are distributed horizontally, with different volumes corresponding to different functions. However, no strict boundaries are set between them; instead, the free flow of functional spaces is encouraged. For instance, the reading areas of the library and the exhibition areas of the art museum are designed in an overlapping form, breaking the traditional boundaries between libraries and museums and promoting interaction across functional zones. The library section will house over one million physical and digital resources, meeting the reading and information access needs of diverse groups. The museum section, on the other hand, will host a variety of contemporary art exhibitions, providing a high-quality platform for art dissemination. The building features a double-layered facade: the inner layer is made of high-performance glass or metal cladding, while the outer layer is covered with a silver aluminum mesh. This “silver veil” not only ensures the transparency of the building but also improves its environmental performance, reducing external disturbances and creating a quiet atmosphere for art appreciation and literary exchanges. Additionally, the SANAA design team has created an outdoor garden on the roof. From here, visitors can enjoy a panoramic view of the greenery of Central Park and Taichung’s urban skyline. The roof space thus serves as an extension of the building’s cultural functions, further strengthening the continuity between the building and nature. As Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, core members of SANAA, stated, they aim to create an open building “that everyone can easily engage with” through such a design. By combining the functions of a library and a museum, they hope to create a versatile space for learning and communication, allowing cultural activities to naturally integrate into daily life and the sensory experience of the park.
Notably, SANAA has maintained high activity in the global cultural architecture field recently. Beyond the Taichung Green Museumbrary, the firm is also involved in the expansion project of the New Museum in New York (with the main design undertaken by OMA), which is progressing smoothly and scheduled to open in the autumn of 2025. The museum’s first large-scale exhibition, themed “Human Nature,” will be launched concurrently with the opening. Meanwhile, architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have received numerous international awards: in 2024, they were honored with the 2025 Le Prix Charlotte Perriand by the Créateurs Design Awards; in 2025, they further won the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). These two honors undoubtedly represent the high recognition of the international architectural community for their design philosophy and practice.
From a global perspective, 2025 is also a “bumper year” for cultural architecture. Apart from SANAA’s related projects, several major cultural facility projects have also made new progress: the reimagined downtown London cultural space “Ibraaz,” designed by architect Sumayya Vally, has officially opened; the cultural center developed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop in the Port of Piraeus, Athens, Greece, has released its first batch of design renderings; and the cultural center and open-air stage project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, designed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, is advancing steadily. Together with the Taichung Green Museumbrary, these projects form an important landscape of global cultural architecture in 2025, demonstrating the diverse explorations of different architectural firms on the “relationship between cultural spaces, cities, and nature.” With its unique design concept and large scale, the Taichung Green Museumbrary will undoubtedly become one of the most representative works among them.
