Jean-loup BALDACCI & Atelier BORONSKI shared with us their first prize winning proposal for the New Taipei Museum of Art competition. Their aim was to create a field of dreams; 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. More images and architects’ description after the break.
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.
Design Team: Peter Boronski and Jean-loup Baldacci; Assisted by: AKio Takatsuka, Nicolas Wehrung, Machi Ikuta Structure consultant: Bernard Schmitt & Cécile Plumier M&E consultant: Takafumi Wada, Raoul Nicolas Rush Hour Extra Team: Christophe Atamaniuk, Matthieu Bonato, Michael Pepper, Luke Jackson, Atsuki Ayama Special Thanks: Lyli Chung, Shih-Yuan Wang, Yuki UCHIDA
