Created as an institution in 2019, TAG Art Museum is located on the south shore of Tangdao Bay, West Coast New District, Qingdao, within the international comprehensive art community The Artists' Garden. The non-profit museum was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel together with French landscape architect Gilles Clément.

Located on the southern bank of Tangdao Bay, this new art complex is made up of 12 interconnected exhibition halls, with a hotel, shops and seating areas, arranged in a linear structure almost 500 meter long winding through gardens, with constant views of the sea.
Jean Nouvel has designed a set of rooms that acquire uniformity thanks to the materials used. The different types of enclosures are made with aluminum, whose silver tones generate an interesting abstraction in contrast to the surrounding gardens. A silvery image that also dialogues with the silvery waters of the calm shore on which it sits.

The anodized aluminum sheets not only boast improved hardness and wear resistance, but also good heat resistance and excellent insulation. The oxide film formed on the sheet surface is protective and decorative, without any paint coating, so as to better adapt to the climate environment of the seaside while highlighting the silver color. In order to avoid color difference and improve corrosion resistance, all anodized aluminum products used for the curtain wall are custom-made and imported from Austria.

Its 12 exhibition halls are connected yet relatively independent, showing different shapes, with a variety of architectural structures and volumes. The design pay special attention to exquisite light application, and exhibition conditions, to exhibit of both classical and contemporary art works.

Jean Nouvel in TAG Art Museum has done many R&D experiments with relevant institutions, and more than 20 systems have been developed independently, such as the lifting ceiling and exterior shading system of No. 5 Exhibition Hall, and the mobile acoustic reflector system of the music auditorium.

TAG Art Museum by Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Image courtesy of TAG

TAG Art Museum by Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Image courtesy of TAG
 

Project description by Ateliers Jean Nouvel

A poetic space for artists and those who are passionate about art, a place where emotional responses to seeing the sea can be shared, a great central garden, with fishermen and their boats, a small creek, parasols, and a rectangular harbour.

An exceptional program:

– A museum that will house NAMOC exhibitions.
– Shops.
– A marina.
– A hotel based on the theme of art, for art lovers, collectors and visitors – but also for artists.
– Wonderful artists’ studios, spacious or very spacious, communicating with the landscape, having close-range or distant views over the woodland or the sea, the boats and the skyline, where a whole future is being built.
– Secure, sheltered car parks where cars can be parked safely with minimal impact on the environment.

A mysterious, dreamlike world
The response to this program cannot be conventional. The museum and hotel cannot consist of two massive, compact buildings set in the middle of the site. Our proposal is to create artists’ gardens where people’s behaviour, encounters and ways of living, both inside and outside, belong to an imaginative, mysterious and dreamlike world.

The first big question is how people are to experience, travel through or cross a site of eleven hectares over a kilometre long, while discovering links, objects, and buildings in harmony with each other, that all belong to some unidentified story.

A museum-promenade
The museum needs to be flexible, but it should remain a museum. Our proposal is to link up several large rooms of the kind extremely well-identified in the world of museography. We also suggest an ‘outside–inside’ promenade that will travel through the museum’s main rooms along the water’s edge and among the trees, with carefully chosen and controlled views over the sea and deep into the undergrowth. We propose a clearly identifiable line that will align several buildings of contrasting characters.

A canopy that defies the seasons
The hotel will be located on a crossing point of the site that is approximately 500 metres long. The difficulty in terms of enjoying life all year round regardless of the seasons, is to be able to protect yourself from the sun, the rain and the cold. A great long painted canopy is a step in the right direction, allowing us to discover the nature of the site. Everyone will take the long painted canopy to access the hotel rooms, restaurants and shops, as well as the museum.

In winter, transparent curtains of various degrees of translucency would be deployed. Other retractable passageways will lead into the woodlands, extending the promenade toward the artists’ studios or the museum entrance. For servicing, small electric vehicles will run along these covered axes and access all the hotel rooms via the lifts.

Contrasting architectural structures
Over the canopy, a terrace planted with tall grasses will be inhabited by rooms and studios with views of the sea and/or the woodland. These structures, placed on top of the canopied support, will create a line of constrasting, diversified architectures, which thereby become so many unexpected identities, the responses of artists and artists’ hang-outs.

To the east, the entrance to the artists’ gardens will lead directly to the hotel as well as to the car parks located nearby. The boundary will be planted with trees, some tall, others bushier. Additional studios will sit on top of the long car park buildings, plainly asserting their presence.

To the north, at the end of the great canopy, the existing harbour will be doubled in size by pontoons, where the pleasure craft of visitors and collectors will dock. Shops will line the port and will be made of concrete in an architecture offering a high level of protection.

The artists’ gardens will invent themselves along such lines whereby every hotel room, every studio and every museum room will express the presence of an artist and the artistic impulse. This world, promoting expressivity and difference, will invent itself starting from a site that has generated these various scenarios. They will fuel the imagination and the act of the artist. The gardens are evidence of the importance China places on the presence of urban artists and the mark artists leave on the urban fabric.


TAG Art Museum by Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Image courtesy of TAG

More information

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Architects
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Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Architect.- Jean Nouvel.
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Design Team, Architects
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- Concept.- Isabelle Agostini, Marie-Hélène Baldran, Alexander Buckerridge, Flavia Cavallari, Chen Chen, Ji Weon Choi, Valeria Colavita, Laetitia Degroote, Xiangjin Deng, Amandine Eyssartier, Ingrid Menon, Merce Solar, Pierre-Yves Thominet, Pierre Voirin, Tiffany Wen, Nobuo Yoshida.
- Project.- Cécile Armandes, Michel Calzada, Xiaofu Fei, Yao Fu, Etienne Gobin, Yue Gu, Juhee Han, Jean-Baptiste Hurstel, He Li, Alexandra Lof, Alain Gvozdenovic, Astrid Hoepfner, Elen Le Dez, Kirsi Marjamaki Mas, Urszula Millez, Seung Paik, Cristina Perez, Anna Philippou.
- Execution.- Yao Fu, Xiaofu Fei, Cristina Perez, Giorgio Carlo Pesenti.
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Project team
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Interior design
Concept.- Sabrina Letourneur, Anita Peboeck.
- SD (Schematic Design), DD (Development Design): Anne-Sophie Bourdais, Anita Peboeck, Cristina Perez, Cecilia Simonetta, Fatima Turu, Yuanqing Zhou.
- Computer Generated images.- Benjamin Alcover, Michael Kafassis, Mizuho Kishi.
- 3D modelling.- Ikbal Bouaita, Alexander Buckeridge, Edward Cheng, Narjis Lemrini, He Li.
- Graphic Design.- Rafaelle Ishkinazi(project), Eugénie Robert (project), Natalie Saccu De Franchi (Execution), Vatsana Takham (project), Elise Taponier (project).
- Model.- Romain Caillon, Rui Pereira.
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Project Managers
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Concept.- Elisabeth Kather
SD (Schematic Design).- Elisabeth Kather with Marie-Hélène Baldran, Alain Gvozdenovic, Kirsi Marjamaki Mas, José Pomares.
DD (Development Design).- José Pomares, Stefan Zopp.
Construction.- Michel Calzada, José Pomares.
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Collaborators
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Landscape.- Gilles Clement / Coloco – Estelle Pardon.
Cost Consultant.- Biad – Bejing Institute of Architectural Design.
Mechanical Engineers.- Biad / Padi.
Façade.- RFR.
Lighting Design.- Burkhard Ehnes and Hervé Descottes.
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Client
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Shandong International Coastal Cultural Industry Co. Ltd.
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Area
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107,000 m².
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Dates
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2013 – Opening.- August 12th, 2021.
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Location
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1111 Yinshatan Road, West Coast New Area, Qingdao, West Sea Bay, China.
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Jean Nouvel, (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008.

Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the "exotically louvered" Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and "candy-colored" Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the "muscular" Guthrie Theater with its cantilevered bridge in Minneapolis, and in Paris, the "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric" Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (a "trip into the unknown" c. 2012).

Pritzker points to several more major works: in Europe, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994), the Culture and Convention Center in Lucerne (2000), the Opéra Nouvel in Lyon (1993) , Expo 2002 in Switzerland and, under construction, the Copenhagen Concert Hall and the courthouse in Nantes (2000); as well as two tall towers in planning in North America, Tour Verre in New York City and a cancelled condominium tower in Los Angeles. International cultural projects such as the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Qatar National Museum in Doha, or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 in London.

In its citation, the jury of the Pritzker prize noted:

Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. [...] The jury acknowledged the ‘persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation’ as qualities abundant in Nouvel’s work.

Among his principal completed projects, we find the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly museum in Paris, the Culture and Congress Center KKL in Lucerne, the extension of the Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Philharmonic of Paris…
 
Among the projects currently under studies or under construction: the “53W53, Tour de Verre” integrating the extension of the MoMA galleries in New York, the residential towers “Le Nouvel” in Kuala Lumpur, “Anderson 18” and “Ardmore” in Singapore and “Rosewood” in São Paulo, the office towers “Hekla” and “Duo” in Paris, the cultural complex “The Artists’ Garden” in Qingdao or the National Art Museum of China NAMOC in Beijing… The design of the Louvre Abu Dhabi began in 2006 with Jean Nouvel’s Partner Architect Hala Wardé.
 

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Gilles Clément (Argenton-sur-Creuse, 1943) gardener, landscaper, botanist and French essayist, he has been a professor at the Versailles High School of Landscape since 1980 and is the architect of various parks and public spaces such as Le Domaine du Rayol (Var) gardens, Matisse (Lille) park, the gardens of the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) and the André Citroën park (Paris). He has written numerous books related to landscaping, in addition to novels, essays and other publications in collaboration with artists, and has published the fundamental treatise on contemporary landscaping The Garden in Motion (2012) and the Third Landscape Manifesto (2018), both published by this same publisher.
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Published on: December 30, 2021
Cite: "Linear composition on the shore. TAG Art Museum by Ateliers Jean Nouvel" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/linear-composition-shore-tag-art-museum-ateliers-jean-nouvel> ISSN 1139-6415
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