The National Palace Museum Southern Branch by Antoine Predock architects
Evoking diverse pan-Asian landscapes through the natural biomes, the Museum comes into view base on an ancient stream-washed Taroko marble.
Rising low and long out of watery mists through a slow ascending gallery spiral, an artifact of inscripted, weathered bronze embracing a mythic garden as the glass and cypress Jade Mountain dissolves into the clouds.
The conceptual armature of the Museum is both literal and abstract, an inhabited mythic Asian space embedded with auspicious content – symbolic of Asian reverence for nature and man’s position between heaven and earth.
The literal Chinese definition of landscape – Shan Shui – is “mountains” and “water”. Like a calligraphic radical (the visual component set that forms the basis of Chinese characters), the Museum is a landscape, it is mountain and water.
A faceted, jade-tinted glass and cypress structure-Jade Mountain-rises from the Museum courtyard, aiming toward the tallest peak in Taiwan, Yu Shan. In Taiwanese aboriginal cosmology Yu Shan is known as Pattonkan, “Glowing Mountain” or “Quartz Mountain”.
Water flows from our Jade Mountain to the quarry-like Lotus Pond amphitheater. The “Three Friends of Winter”, Bamboo, Plum and Pine extend the courtyard garden landscape with fortuitous symbolism.
The Taroko base recalls Taiwan’s geologic origins. Slowly rising, the galleries are sheathed in protective bronze skin, patinated to a color like Han chariot figures.
The Museum exhibit experience is presented as a cinematographic unfolding of space. Similar to a viewer visually traveling through a Song dynasty Shan Shui hand scroll, museum visitors accumulate experience, aided and abetted by digital media.
The viewer experiences spatial episodes, accruing a Pan-Asian perspective that continually branches, ebbs and flows. A wireless digital overlay throughout the site and all galleries, interweaves pan-Asian subtexts culminating in the glowing stone Media Lantern, a digitally painted Mogao cave.
Antoine Predock
Born 1936 in Lebanon, Missouri, as the Principal of Antoine Predock Architect PC which he established in 1967. Predock attended the University of New Mexico and later received his Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia University.
Predock first gained national attention with the La Luz community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University was his first nationally won design competition.
His influence extends to international sites with the National Palace Museum Southern Branch in Southern Taiwan and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, both are currently in design phases.
In 1985, Antoine Predock was awarded the Rome Prize and in 2006 he was honored with the American Institute of Architects highest award, the AIA Gold Medal.
National Palace Museum Southern Branch
Chiayi County, Taiwan
Project completion: 2010
ANTOINE PREDOCK Architect PC
Albuquerque Studio
300 12th Street NW
Albuquerque, NM 87102
P. (505) 843-7390
F. (505) 243-6254
studio@apredock.com
Taipei Studio
23-F, 105 Dun Hua South Road, Section 2
Taipei 106
Taiwan
anpujianju@predock.com
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting, hope to see you back again soon!
