A Cultural Forest Where Books and Art Intertwine

Designed by SANAA, Taichung Green Museumbrary brings together a public library and an art museum within a shared cultural environment. Guided by SANAA's architectural principles of openness, transparency, and fluidity, the building dissolves conventional boundaries between institutions. Light, wind, greenery, and people flow naturally through the space, creating an environment that encourages wandering, discovery, and unexpected encounters.

Here, nature, knowledge, and aesthetics exist in a state of continual exchange — sometimes converging, sometimes dispersing. The Museumbrary invites visitors to engage with culture not as a fixed destination, but as an evolving experience shaped by curiosity and everyday exploration.

Digital Fluidity: An Experience of Wandering and Discovery

The Green Museumbrary Digital Experience extends SANAA’s architectural vision into the digital realm. Rather than treating technology as a separate layer, the project uses digital systems to amplify the building’s core qualities of transparency and fluidity. Through dynamic connections between space, art, knowledge, and people, the digital experience becomes part of the cultural ecosystem itself.

At the heart of the experience is wandering as a mode of discovery. In an era increasingly shaped by algorithms and personalized feeds, people are often guided toward the familiar and the expected. The Green Museumbrary offers an alternative—one that values serendipity, curiosity, and unexpected encounters. Visitors are invited to set aside the habit of searching with intent, drift freely through the building, and encounter knowledge and beauty in unexpected ways.

To extend the building's language of openness and fluidity into the visitor experience, the digital strategy is built around three interconnected principles.

• Enabling Flow and Connection Through Digital Experiences
  Digital systems create dynamic connections between the library and museum collections, linking spaces, knowledge, artworks, and visitors into an evolving network of discovery. In doing so, they enable each visitor to chart their own path through the cultural forest.

• From Functional Services to Fusion Experience
  The experience begins with practical visitor services and gradually expands into deeper forms of engagement. Information, collections, and cultural content are brought together across both institutions, creating experiences that are only possible through the unique convergence of a library and an art museum.

• Multi-Scale Interfaces: From Personal to Public
  The experience unfolds across three scales of interaction: mobile devices for individual exploration, node-point digital displays for shared engagement, and a large-scale circular LED installation for collective cultural experiences. Together, these interfaces support multiple modes of discovery, responding to the diverse ways visitors explore and engage within the cultural forest.

Media Guide

The Museumbrary can create and publish customized thematic guides tailored to exhibitions, events, and educational programs. Supported by a shared content management system connecting both institutions, library resources and museum collections are curated as integrated narratives — with the flexibility to support future cross-disciplinary collaborations.

AI Guide

The AI Guide is a conversational companion that accompanies visitors throughout their journey. Responsive to each visitor's context and curiosity, it offers wayfinding, answers questions about the Museumbrary, and surfaces personalized recommendations for exhibitions, programs, and spaces.

Exploration Game — Wanderer

Wanderer is a gamified exploration experience designed to encourage curiosity-driven discovery. Through a series of missions, visitors are invited to slow down, roam through the Museumbrary, and collect “Seeds of Inspiration” along the way.

Fusion Portal

The Fusion Portal is the cultural forest's digital rabbit hole — inviting visitors to move beyond physical wandering and enter a digital realm of exploration.

Using AI-powered semantic analysis, the system maps relationships across library collections and museum holdings. Rather than organizing content through conventional classifications, books and artworks are woven together into a shared network of meaning — a living digital ecosystem where knowledge and art continuously intersect.

Flow in the Forest

Natural light, wind, environmental conditions, and human movement together shape the living rhythm of the Green Museumbrary. Flow in the Forest transforms these invisible forces into a dynamic visual experience. Using real-time environmental data — temperature, humidity, and wind speed — combined with visitor movement patterns, the installation visualizes the ever-changing life of the cultural forest through generative light and shadow.

Displayed alternately with the Fusion Portal on the circular LED screen,the two works form the portraits of the Green Museumbrary as a living system — where architecture, people, and environment move as one.