Frank Gehry (photo courtesy of Paul Morigi)
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry’s first major building in East Asia has just broken ground in Taiwan.
Gehry is often called one of the world’s premier deconstructivist architects. However, he has frequently rebuffed such titles, not wanting to be stuck into one category or another. He does have a distinct style, though, giving his own flair to things as small as a new Hennessy decanter, as mundane as school office buildings in Australia, and as iconic as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Over the last decade, he has also taken on new projects in Asia. The first of these structures was a residential building at 53 Stubbs Road in Hong Kong. This was followed by another project in Hong Kong and another in South Korea. Gehry has also been asked to design the Guggenheim’s new location in Abu Dhabi. But now, in what some publications call the architect’s first major building in East Asia, construction has begun at the China Medical University (CMU) in Taichung, Taiwan, on the university’s Museum of Fine Arts.
The concept art gives you a good idea of who designed the building. The planned work screams Gehry, with the architect taking inspiration from natural elements like water and sky. The rippling, reflective exterior is meant to be surrounded by trees, plants, and water features. In an interview with the New York Times, Gehry said the design “is inspired by reflections of buildings, trees, and the sky on pools of water and mirrored steel. Using softer stainless steel, we crafted a fluid form through precise folds and curves. The building will shimmer gently, breathing with light, like a watercolor in motion.” The museum is the centerpiece of the CMU’s new campus in Shuinan, which has been in the planning stages since 2014. Since Gehry no longer submits to architecture competitions, the university invited him to design the museum. The CMU has long been a prominent institution in the fields of medicine and biotechnology. Still, it has been making an effort over the past decade to become a better space for arts education. The new museum, scheduled to be completed in 2028, is meant to be a sort of epicenter of artistic creation and education. It will also be a new nexus for collaboration with other prominent educational institutions worldwide. Furthermore, the museum will also serve as a creative hub for the city of Taichung.