Winner of Taiwan's new Taoyuan Museum of Arts competition announced

The Taoyuan Museum of Arts competition opened in September 2017 with the prompt of designing a new space for fine art in Taiwan. Of the 14 competing teams, 4 were chosen for the second stage. Joe Shih. Architects + Riken Yamamoto and Field Shop won first prize with a proposal of developing the arts museum as an entertainment landscape hill in the heart of Taoyuan City. Riken Yamamoto and Field Shop have also notably designed the Yokosuka Museum of Art, the Tianjin Library, and the Zurich Airport. 

Finalists:

Second place: Ricky Liu & Associates
Third place: JJPan and Partners, Architects and Planners + MVRDV
Forth place: Q-LAB + menacoo architecten

The winning design consists of a hill as a place of attraction with terraces that displays works of art, pavilions, trees, and observatory decks. The incline connects these various attraction spaces and also serves as bleacher seating for performances in the art plaza below. Located at the center of Taoyuan, the museum will continue to develop its relationship with the surrounding residential communities through artist workshops, open studios, restaurants and cafes.

The boxes located along the hillside will serve as multipurpose spaces for artists to sell their works and to hold feature exhibitions. The team's design consists of three spatial layers: the Cube, the Hill, and the In-between. The Cube is an enclosed space for exhibition, the Hill is a landscape to concentrate attractions, and the In-between serves as the connection inside which installation art, performance art, and workshops will take place. 

The museum will consist of two hillside sites split between a main road in the city and connected through an enclosed bridge. On the north end site, the design incorporates views of a pond landscape. The stage of the auditorium is set facing toward this view with a movable lifting wall behind the stage for the audience to enjoy this backdrop. Facing the road running between the two sites, the museum buildings will incorporate a glass façade to display the museum's activity to passing traffic.