The Museum Building
P. S. Chen and Partners with Yu I Lu Architects · Opened 1994
From the plaza the museum appears as a long, low mass of dark red brick, stepped back in horizontal bands and pierced by a colonnade along the front. A row of flagpoles marks the approach, and a big circular window on the right-hand wing gives the otherwise severe facade a single playful note. Behind it the roof rises in a clerestory that lights the central hall. The building was designed for the city by the Taiwanese firm of P. S. Chen and Partners with Yu I Lu Architects and opened in June nineteen ninety four, when Kaohsiung was still better known for its harbour and heavy industry than for its culture.
The design belongs to the late modern museum architecture of the nineteen eighties and nineties, when institutions wanted buildings that were dignified rather than spectacular. Look at how the brick is laid in bands with recessed courses to break up the bulk, and at the way the entrance is set deep in shadow under the colonnade to give relief from the southern sun. The plan is simple: galleries wrap around a great top-lit hall on three levels, and the offices and stores are pushed to the back. The materials, brick outside and pale stone inside, were chosen to weather the humid climate.
The museum has since expanded across the park with the Children's Museum of Art and the Neiwei Arts Center, and a competition in two thousand and twenty selected the Los Angeles firm Oyler Wu Collaborative with Ren Lai Architects to reshape the building and its surroundings over the coming years. For now the brick block remains the anchor of the whole park, and the view of it across the lawns from the sculpture garden is the classic picture of Gaomei.
Did You Know? When it opened in nineteen ninety four it was only the third public art museum in Taiwan, after Taipei and Taichung.
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