Public Space & Boundary & Ownership of Tainan City (1/2)

This is the first time I've been back since 2019, I feel like in recent years, every time when I visit home, I'd apply everything I learned abroad to reinterpret and re-appreciate the beauty of Taiwan. For example, I'd study the urban planning layout and the history of certain city, and then come back and apply that same critical lens to re-think the entire heritage of Tainan City. In a sense, as I mature and hone my skillset, my hometown is also growing with me proportionally. 

With that being said, there had been lots of new architecture happening while I was gone so I got to do my rounds and check out some updates. I've done a brief blog on my city back in 2017 so make sure you check out the prequel of this blog post with the link below:
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www.hsunico.com/life/hometown-love
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​Tainan Museum / Shigeru Ban / 2019

This was one of my most anticipated one for the trip, there is just something about your hometown getting a Pritzker Prize winner building that absolutely excites me.  Shigeru Ban won the competition back in 2014 and the building was finally completed in late 2019. The massing itself stacks up as a vertical city to create elevated parks and niches that reflect on the surrounding context. The massive signature roof hovers over the "city" as a canopy that reads like a veil. This one is like a cousin of both the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the renovation project of the former architecture school in Nanterre. In terms of the spatial experience, it does remind me of the Louis Vuitton Foundation by Frank Gehry in Paris.​

Below is one of the renderings from the competition submission back in 2014 and the physical model showing the dense urban fabric in the historic quarter of the city.

Tainan City is an old town, and the site is right next to the first Confucius temple in Taiwan, therefore Shigeru Ban was bold to introduce a new way of public spaces and parks. The project inevitably received a lot of local backlashes, it is always interesting to observe the disconnection between architects and users. 

The monumental veil on the top was developed together with Professor Satoshi Sakai of Kyoto University, this project allowed him to take the research into reality and at a bigger scale as well.

Hardware impact was one thing, the software - cultural part was also a challenge. The museum curators had to go through trial and errors to test out the general public's appetite for contemporary arts. This is something I never thought about, I always travel to world-class museums and simply enjoy whatever the current exhibition is, never occured to me how museum had to carefully curate the shows to nurture local cultures and reflect city identities and values.

Interesting signage design that tailors to the massing of the museum.

The exhibition I visited at the time showcased how new generation of indigenous fashion designers implement their cultures and textile techniques into contemporary fashion design.