Taichung Green Museumbrary, located on the north side of Taichung Central Park, is a hybrid cultural institution that brings together the Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library under one roof. Designed by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) in collaboration with Ricky Liu & Associates Architects, the building carries an ambition that goes beyond its elegant surface: to reimagine what contemporary public space can be.

Let’s rewind to a day in 2020, when designers from SANAA met with us at ULTRACOMBOS. The question on the table was deceptively simple:

“Digital in the Green Museumbrary should not just mean putting a few public computers in the building.”

At the time, none of us imagined how far this question would unfold.

Through a shared resonance around cross-disciplinary integration and design language, SANAA formally invited ULTRACOMBOS to serve as the digital consultant for the Green Museumbrary. The first step, however, was not to discuss solutions, but to return to first principles:

What is a library? What is a museum? And ultimately, what is SANAA?

We all hoped that digital would not exist as an add-on, but as an integral, inseparable part of the whole.

For reasons I can’t quite explain, around that time I happened to watch two documentaries by master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman on Giloo: National Gallery and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Almost uncannily, they mirrored the two institutional natures embedded within the Green Museumbrary.

Wiseman’s signature “direct cinema” style offers no interviews, no narration, only carefully edited sequences of real-life moments. His authorial intent is strong, yet as a viewer, I felt like an invisible presence, quietly standing aside and witnessing reality unfold.

The film reveals the tension between the National Gallery’s sacred artistic mission and the demands of the secular world.

In one scene, the board debates whether to rent out the museum’s exterior walls for advertising during the London Marathon. The director of the museum stands firm as a defender of traditional values, opposing the commercialization of the building’s facade and insisting that any promotion must align with the institution’s mission. Marketing consultants, on the other hand, argue that without attracting broader contemporary audiences, the museum risks irrelevance and eventual decline.

In another scene, children sit casually on the floor, energetically engaging with a guide, unconcerned about disturbing adults quietly viewing paintings nearby. The film then cuts to a private, intimate tour led by the director for potential donors. One moment gestures toward equality and openness, while the other exposes the inescapable reality of hierarchy.

Through Wiseman’s lens, the inner struggles of a museum navigating ideals and survival become strikingly visible. It offered me an initial understanding of the tension between the dream and reality of running an art institution.

Before watching this film, my saw a library as just a quiet, air-conditioned study hall. What Wiseman shows instead is a space so much more than just reading.

A few scenes that stayed with me:

• Employment support: In one branch, job information sessions are held. At first, I wondered why this wasn’t happening at an employment office. But as more “non-traditional” activities appear, it becomes clear that all of this falls under the broader mission of knowledge equity.
• Wi-Fi lending: The library lends portable Wi-Fi hotspots to families without internet access, directly addressing the digital divide.
• Materials libraries: One branch houses free creative materials. Through hands-on workshops, people learn how to use these resources to create. A librarian even notes that Andy Warhol “borrowed” extensively from here.
• Poetry readings: In the main hall, someone recites poetry. Passersby stop, listen, and share a quiet, unexpected moment of beauty.
• The human Wikipedia: You can call a librarian with any question. They might recommend books, or even talk through the content of a book with you in real time.

The New York Public Library demonstrates how, in a city of vastly different communities, libraries can become decentralized nodes of empowerment. As one line in the film puts it:

“The library is not about books. The library is about people.”

These two films reveal radically different approaches to public responsibility.

National Gallery portrays a vertical, centralized institution striving to preserve artistic purity within a consumer-driven society.

Ex Libris presents a horizontal, decentralized network that grows in response to community needs.

The greatest challenge and allure of the Green Museumbrary lies precisely in its attempt to hold both ends of this spectrum within a single space: the vertical temple and the horizontal network.

After reading extensively, it became clear that the Green Museumbrary is the ultimate expression of SANAA’s architectural language, pushing scale, complexity, and possibility to an unprecedented level. What follows is a brief reflection on the building itself, from my non-architect perspective (Honestly, I’m a bit nervous writing this.)

Eight boxes

As noted earlier, the museum and the library operate under very different conditions. SANAA’s response was to propose a cluster of eight boxes, each varying in size, orientation, and floor height. These volumes are connected through circulation, forming a spatial composition that feels both fragmented and continuous.

Here, knowledge and art encounter each other by chance. Architecture becomes what SANAA describes as a “cultural forest”, much like the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, welcoming visitors from every direction. A small aside: ULTRACOMBOS visited Kanazawa for our company trip this year, experiencing firsthand how contemporary architecture can seamlessly integrate into everyday urban life.

Because I visited the site while it was still at the foundation stage, I remember seeing the seismic isolation bearings spread across the ground. Only then did I realize that beneath each slender column lies one of these massive discs. It was this unseen engineering that made such extreme slenderness possible. SANAA’s pursuit of lightness permeates every spatial detail, releasing the building from a sense of weight.

“Transparency” is perhaps the most frequently cited term when describing SANAA’s work. Yet what they pursue is not invisibility, but transition. Not disappearance, but the reconstruction of relationships.

In the Green Museumbrary, extensive use of glass and expanded metal mesh creates partitions that feel like thin veils. Light diffuses, sightlines pass through. The boundaries between inside and outside, library and museum, park and city are gently blurred.

In the documentary Tokyo Ride, Ryue Nishizawa drives his beloved Alfa Romeo through heavy rain. The car windows fog up constantly, forcing him to wipe them repeatedly, even opening the window to equalize temperatures, soaking his shirt in the process. He loves the car precisely because it allows such direct contact with wind, rain, and engine noise. It is a perfect metaphor for SANAA’s pursuit of permeability and flow between interior and exterior.

It also reminds me of the Teshima Art Museum, where light, wind, and rain are free to enter. Another aside: ULTRACOMBOS visited Teshima last year. Silence is strictly enforced there, but the sudden crying of a two-year-old child echoed endlessly through the space. That acoustic experience is something I will never forget.

In his recent book Ryu-e Shikō, Nishizawa writes:

“When we speak of ‘vitality,’ what first comes to mind are flow and transparency. Take a river or a pond. When water stops flowing, it becomes murky and decays. Fish cannot survive, and the environment turns lifeless. When flow returns, the water clears, oxygen increases, transparency improves, fish return, and life emerges again. When there is movement, when things can enter and exit, vitality begins.”

This seems to capture SANAA’s expectation for the Green Museumbrary. The architecture provides the conditions for flow and transparency, but it requires participation. People must bring things in and take things out. Only then does it become a site of cultural circulation.

SANAA’s architecture liberates both institutions from fixed assumptions. There is no “correct” way to use this space. It invites citizens not only to experience culture, but to actively participate in its ongoing formation.

The Green Museumbrary represents a new imagination of publicness, for audiences and institutions alike. It is an expectation of vitality.

As for ULTRACOMBOS, how digital integrates into this “cultural forest” will be explored in the next chapter, through on-site interviews and field research with architects, institutions, experts, and existing staff, alongside the gradual involvement of many professional teams. More to come. (Yes, I’m saying that myself.)

P.S. The Green Museumbrary officially opened on December 13, 2025. Beyond the remarkable opening exhibition, there are spatial experiences that defy description and expectation. You really need to be there.

Photo: Courtesy of SANAA
Text by: Jay
Key Visual: 一杯中冰美