ArchShowcase Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. New Taipei City Museum of Art in Taiwan by Peter Boronski and Jean-loup Baldacci (designed using Sketchup and Artisan)November 8th, 2011 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: Peter Boronski and Jean-loup Baldacci This is a large multi-program museum to be built on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan. We wanted to make a museum that was well connected to the site and had extremely good public spaces, both interior and exterior. Drawing on the historical convergence of influences from several different nations over the centuries, the convergence of the rivers bounding the site, and the multi-use program of the museum itself we chose to work with the idea of convergence for this project. But by pulling the park up into the project and by bending the building down into the ground we were able to create something that is in between building and landscape. It is easy to enjoy this museum weather you enter it or just have a picnic, up high on the grass with friends, while enjoying the view.
A Field of Dreams… This is a building for the people. Its existence actually extends the park and because it merges street and park it invites a high degree of participation. It is completely accessible for people to walk and even ride bicycles all over. The public can easily ‘take possession’ of this building, even just to come and sit on the grass and enjoy the view as they picnic on these huge pieces of ‘ground’ floating in the sky. But through various openings and glazed apertures the interiors beckon…. This is a fast building to help slow you down. It is a fluid and porous construction that lies somewhere between building and landscape. Park spaces and museum spaces are positioned among each other. Ground and object are disassociated, surreal. This is place to dream… This is not a museum as singular object but rather a field of overlapping volumes, surfaces that form compressing and expanding interior and exterior spaces, a quasi-urban “field” to wander on. It is more a “stream of consciousness” to dive into than a building as signature object. Partial figures caught mid-flight, like a digital river – frozen. Rather than seeking to distinguish itself by formal separation from its surroundings this building seeks to distinguish itself by formal integration. In a gesture that is both literal and conceptual it seeks to connect with its physical site and with the ever-changing phenomenon called Art that it seeks to house. Like the various historical, political and cultural influences that have been converging and working to shape the modern democracy of Taiwan this museum sweeps up out of the ground in a dis-array of fluid elements, curving and crossing like the waters of the converging Yingge & Dahan rivers below. These elements are containers that struggle to contain, as they themselves slip, bulge and emerge. There are compartments but they are not regular, and there are volumes and voids… Their understanding requires movement, a changing of positions, like a cinematic experience. Stasis is not comfortable in this house. Like the paths that roam over this building these elements lead away from the idea of ‘object’ and its correlative sanctifying, towards fields of multiple associations that are anticipative of the necessity of change. They lead to a pliable and porous organism that promotes multiple & alternative forms of thought. Together they form a place to nurture and experience the convergence and re-positioning of the endless stream of ideas, passion and craft that is art. Tags: New Taipei City, Taiwan |