Spiral Garden Museum

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Spiral Garden Museum

Type

Cultural › Gallery Hall/Theater Cultural Center Museum
Educational › Library

SIZE

1,000,000 +

BUDGET

$50M - 100M

SPIRAL GARDEN MUSEUM
A NEW
MUSEUM: AN OPEN MUSEUM EXPERIENCEMore open to a wider public, Contemporary Art Museums
are becoming hybrids programs and transforming the way that people approach to
art and becoming real places to be. The key issue for New Taipei City Museum of
Art is how to gather people and art while integrating the landscape into the
museum and the museum into the park? In the “Art as lifestyle strategy” the
project attributes equal importance to people than to exhibit spaces and art
collections. Seeking a new equilibrium in the museum’s spatial structure, the
project considers the people circulation as a raw matter to define and
construct the museum experience. The architecture proposes to live the museum
as a dynamic experience where people shall have an important role in shaping
the museum’s image.

ARCHITECTURE AS
INVITATION: THE SPIRALGARDENMUSEUM
The proposal aims to be an architectural open
invitation to enjoy art as lifestyle. Conceived as a natural extension of the
park’s pathways, a spiral ramp climbs embracing the museum façade from the main
level up to the top of the building. It shapes a progressive wider spiral
garden which invites visitors and tourist to discover art and landscape in a
new way. This gentle green way evolves very slowly, (the ramp reaches a maximal
inclination of 4%) being an easily and pleasant way to climb up to the museum. Arrived
to the top of the circuit, visitors can enjoy the roof garden, an outdoor art
terrace in a magnificent natural frame.

This continuous spiral walkway provides a living
dynamism to whole building. The network of ramps and terraces, exhibition
spaces and resting areas, shall display tourists climbing and descending ramps
seeing each other, people socializing in informal ways and spaces, visitors
entering and exiting exhibitions and art meetings, etc. By its inviting architecture, The Spiral
Garden Museum experience, shall engage both, the art specialist and the common
citizen, the occasional tourist and the art amateur, a wider public of all ages
and backgrounds, embodying the image of a newly emerging “art as lifestyle”
identity.

AN INNOVATIVE
LANDSCAPE MUSEUM TYPOLOGY
The proposal
seeks to define a new positioning for the museum and for the exhibition space taking
into consideration to reduce its impact in the landscape of the park. The
strategy consists in assembling the program of two museums and the public
services in a unique vertical building, keeping a permanent living “vertebral
column” walkway. As the dominant feature, the ascending spiral garden organizes
vertically the exhibition and spatial structure of the museum, providing both
internal and external access to the sequences of cultural and artistic programs,
commercial and resting spaces, bringing people back to art. It shall display a
magnificent experience where visitors seem to be floating over the museum
exhibitions, an exiting sightseeing trip open over the park and the museum,
integrating both into the landscape, and inviting visitors and citizens to
rediscover art between the park and the sky.

A system of
vertical mobile and pliable lamellas provides the necessary flexibility to the
exhibits rooms, which could be freely organized for any given exhibition
activity, allowing a large variety of museum installations and contemporary
exhibition layouts. With this method, the
different galleries were organized in separate rooms to create a maximum of
curatorial freedom but keeping the possibility to be used together to host one
exhibition, or separated in arrangements of two or more rooms.

This new
typological positioning shall ensure having an accessible and non sacred-like
exhibition space, it shall not overshadow the artworks displayed within, but it
will be able to change and allow a wider range of permeability and brightness. On
the center of the exhibition level a series of enclosed exhibition spaces
allows visitors to focus on the experience of art, whereas on the outside the SpiralGarden
ramp connects the programmatic levels, alternating these intimate experiences
with views on the surrounding landscape.

PEOPLE AS A
DRIVING FORCE
The idea was to offer to people many different ways to
use and live the museum, encouraging visitors to approach art in their
lifestyle. The design gives special attention to museum polyvalence. In that
sense the character of mayor spaces encourage and allow ephemeral and informal
uses and practices. For example, the Sky Art Terrace conceived as exterior
exhibition space, will host the sculpture collection of the museum, but it
could be also used as event space, accommodating lectures, ephemeral art
markets, and live art performances or outdoor art film screenings or even art picnics.
According to people increasing sustainable awareness,
the building design incorporates green technologies, from the installation of water
absorption devices on the building’s roof to climate control through geothermal
heating and cooling, or filtering water systems integrated into the spiral ramp
garden.

A TOURISTIC ATTRACTION DEVICE
The whole project is conceived in a touristic
strategy, in terms of creating identifiable attractions venues, such as the
Spiral Garden, the Sky Art Terrace, Art Gallery Mall opens to a wider public:
Enhancing the role of non structural programmatic spaces, like circulations,
gift shops and commercial points, or outdoor spaces, often considered in
conventional museums, as a lesser importance programs, they becomes major
attractions for this new museum concept proposal.

The SpiralGarden with its carefully
chosen local biodiversity flora will provide a new touristic dimension to the
Park, attracting an additional mass of visitors and enhancing its recreational
and leisure vocation. One of the most important venues The Sky Art Terrace,
located on the top of the building as culmination of the spiral ramp, will
offer public outdoor exposition spaces for temporary art performances as well
the Hall of Fame and the three thematic restaurants, providing various
dramatics and unexpected view sights to visitors.

The
project transforms the NTCMArt into an inclusive new landscape display, where museum
experience will no longer be viewed as a sacred specialist experience, but
rather as a participative and embracing activity, where art and lifestyle gather
natural landscape in an innovative and iconic new 21 century venue.