The North Building
Opened 1997
Stand back on the forecourt and the North Building reads as a single enormous block of grey granite, with the museum's name in gold characters high on the wall and a wide dark opening at ground level where the entrance sits under an exposed steel truss. The building was planned in the late nineteen eighties as part of Taiwan's programme of national museums and opened to the public in November nineteen ninety seven, giving the industrial south of the island a science museum to match those in the north. It has over one hundred thousand square metres of floor space, which is why it is often described as the largest science museum in Asia.
The design plays with simple geometry. From above the complex is a set of triangles, rectangles and circles linked by straight bridges, and on the ground you feel that logic in the long straight approach, the square mass of the exhibition block and the round drum of the giant screen cinema. Look at the stone cladding, laid in a regular grid that gives the walls a machined, almost technical texture, and at the steel truss over the entrance, which is deliberately left visible as a piece of engineering on show. The road in front separates this building from the South Building, home to the collection stores and research offices.
The museum is run by the Ministry of Education and was conceived as a museum of applied science and technology rather than of natural history, with Taiwan's own industrial story at its centre. More than two million people a year come through this entrance, most of them families and school groups from across southern Taiwan. Before you go in, notice the banners on the lampposts, which advertise the changing special exhibitions that fill the temporary halls, and the Taiwan Railway station a few minutes away that was built and named specifically for the museum.
Did You Know? The exhibition halls run from three floors below ground to six floors above it, so the building is far deeper than it looks from the street.
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