TAICHUNG.- Taichung Art Museum will present Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Architecture & Environment, on view from January 30 to May 9 2027, at the Taichung Green Museumbrary.
Founded by internationally acclaimed architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA presents its largest exhibition to date. The show brings together architectural drawings, models, photography, and archival materials spanning three decades of design practice. Featuring projects across different periods, geographical contexts, and scales, the exhibition highlights the work of SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, and the Office of Ryue Nishizawa. An extensive collection of architectural models offers rare insights into the design process, inviting visitors to explore SANAA’ s architectural aesthetic from multiple perspectives.
Opened in 2025, the Taichung Green Museumbrary integrates the Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library into an interconnected cultural landmark. Coinciding with SANAA receiving the 2025 Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the building represents one of SANAA’ s largest cultural projects and stands as an expression of their design philosophy. The exhibition creates a dialogue between the architects’ work and the building itself. Reflecting SANAA’ s longstanding exploration of the relationship between architecture and environment, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how buildings interact with their surroundings and shape connections between people, nature, and urban life.
Three Decades of SANAA’s Architectural Thinking
Founded in 1995, SANAA is internationally recognized for its lightness, transparency, and fluid spatial language. Rather than treating buildings as isolated objects with a clear divide between inside and outside, SANAA sees architecture as something that extends into, and is shaped by, its surroundings.
This approach takes different forms in response to each site. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in Japan (2004) uses a transparent faade to blur the line between the museum and everyday life. The Louvre-Lens Museum in France (2012) blends into its open landscape through low, horizontally extending volumes. The Art House Project on Inujima in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, extends this thinking from a single building to an entire village, transforming existing houses to bring art, architecture, nature, and local life into conversation.
From Large-Scale Models to Architectural Photography: SANAA Across Scales
Spanning Exhibition Rooms A, B, and C at the Taichung Art Museum and the Era Space at the Taichung Public Library, the exhibition brings together architectural models, including process models from several SANAA projects presented to the public for the first time, drawings, photography, moving images, and large-scale installations. The models trace SANAA’s design process from initial concepts and spatial studies to experimentation and refinement.
The exhibition also features photographer Walter Niedermayr, a longtime SANAA collaborator whose work explores how human activity and architecture shape landscapes. In addition, models, videos, and photographs of Kazuyo Sejima’s Inujima Art House Project reveal how architecture, art, nature, and local life together shape the island’s distinctive landscape.
Inside SANAA’s Architecture: Experiencing “Architecture and Environment”
Presenting three decades of SANAA’s work within a building designed by the practice itself creates a unique dialogue between exhibition and architecture. Visitors are invited to move beyond the exhibition rooms into the Green Museumbrary and its surroundings, experiencing firsthand the relationships between park and building, interior and exterior, and people and environment.
Founded in 1995 by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA is an internationally acclaimed architectural practice. The two architects were jointly awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2010, one of the highest honors in architecture. Their practice encompasses a wide range of projects in Japan and internationally, including cultural and public institutions, commercial buildings, and residential architecture. Notable works include the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the New Museum, New York, USA; the Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland; and the Louvre-Lens Museum, France.
