Client: Taiyuan City Government
Total Area: 40,500 m2
Construction Budget: RMB 200,000,000
Winner of the international competition
Project Schedule: 2007-2010
Project Team: Preston Scott Cohen (architectural design); Amit Nemlich (planning); Collin Gardner, Hao Ruan, Joshua Dannenberg (design assistants, modeling, renderings); Yair Keshet(model)
Project Consultants: Architecture Design and Research Institute of South East University

The winning competition proposal for the Taiyuan Museum of Art represents a new approach for establishing relationships between place, technology and artistic culture, past and present. The building's form is analogous to the extraordinary agricultural landscapes native to the Shanxi Province. Just as the landscapes of curved terraces in Shanxi respond to the laws of irrigation and topography, the curved and tessellated surfaces of the Taiyuan Museum of Art respond to contemporary technologies for controlling natural and artificial light. The spatial effect recalls the multiple perspectives of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. As opposed to the Western tradition of framed one point perspectives, the curved and angled forms of the Taiyuan Museum of Art produce unanticipated spatial layers, sequences of light and shade, continuities and discontinuities, all in an immersive environment that appears to be unbound. These forms provide a visual guide for visitors while creating a series of delicate filters for light. Thus, the aesthetic transfiguration of the native Shanxi Province landscape serves as the basis for a new spatial experience. The guiding premise of the project is the need to organize the museum according to a dialectic of discontinuity and continuity. The building produces the impression of a unified sequence of spaces while at the same time giving visitors the freedom either to follow a path that is clearly defined by the architecture or to skip from one gallery to another in a non-linear fashion.
As if a continuation of the surrounding green island, the building refuses the typical distinctions between building and landscape. In so doing, it creates a heterogeneous park of hardscapes, lawns and sculpture gardens. It registers multiple scales of territory ranging from the enormity of the Fen River to the intimacy of its own particular natural episodes. The distinctions between landscape zones of various scalar affiliations helps to guide users to the three primary thresholds: the main museum entrance, the sculpture garden entrance, and the entrance to the educational programs. Inside, the security of museum space is maintained by a highly controlled interface between gallery and non-gallery programs. The individual sets of elevators and cores are distributed to guarantee easy access and divisibility between zones needing to be regulated according to different schedules and rules of access, publicity and privacy. At the garage level, the loading areas are clearly divided in order to accommodate food services and art delivery separately and without interfering with parking lots for staff or the public. Spaces for mechanicals and storage help divide the other publicly accessible spaces. The roofs and courtyards have the advantage of offering opportunities to manage rainwater for the purpose of irrigating the surrounding landscape. The building will be designed to make use of a wide range of possible glass technologies that both enhance light transmission as well as contribute sustainable principles. To this end, one goal will be to use photovoltaics embedded in glass, as a means to reduce energy consumption.