Pritzker Prize recipient Shigeru Ban has won the Tainan Museum of Fine Arts competition with a proposal that features a pentagonal shade canopy, designed to imitate nature through digital modeling.
Tainan’s local government organised the international competition in a bid to promote the development of the city's fine arts culture and industry.
Shigeru Ban proposed a museum with an assortment of vertically stacked indoor and outdoor spaces, accommodating exhibition galleries, classrooms, shops and restaurants, as well as landscaping that includes an outdoor sculpture park, a water fountain and a children's playground.
Glass shutters enclose each indoor area, but can be slid up and overhead to also open the gallery spaces to the outdoors.
Sheltering the creative areas is a pentagonal roof canopy, supported by large diagonal structural columns.
The fractal roof design, which, according to a description on the competition website, was digitally modeled to imitate large tree leaves, will serve to shade the museum while promoting natural ventilation.
Covering an area of 26,400 square metres, the $59 million museum is slated to become the art and cultural centrepiece of Taiwan's oldest city.
Courtesy Architects Magazine
