Portfolio_New Taipei Museum as a strategic architectural form respond to the city

The home of seven million inhabitants, metropolitan Taipei is composed of 29 districts based on grid configuration. There are not only a number of micro-cities created by infrastructure like highway, railway, etc., but also leftover areas caused by the city’s geographic condition, namely the mountains and rivers. The point of departure for our proposal refers to the site itself, where in fact two cities, Yingge city and Sansia, overlap. This overlap can be harnessed as a common space for the two cities.

The museum then is a strategic and precise volume that serves as an inhabitable extension of the two overlapping cities, at once defining their border and the glue that keeps them together. In order to address our interpretation of the site, the proposal refers to the strategic form embodied in the Capitoline Museums. In the same way as the Capitoline, the architecture defines two squares that face the adjacent cities, through the the form of unique S-shaped building. Two the squares are linked through the museum, as well as on the scale of the entire park by creating a free corridor in the middle, open to diverse programs. Rotating the “S” onto its side, the two squares benefit both cities by giving two distinct characteristics of a square. Rather than becoming the end of each of the two cities, the museum becomes the meeting point of the two.