You may not be familiar with the term “LAM convergence”, but it is a significant trend in civic architecture and urban planning.

From the under-construction Barack Obama Presidential Centre, in Chicago, in the United States, to The Library at the Dock in Melbourne, Australia, and the Oodi Central Library and Amos Rex in Helsinki, Finland, the meshing of libraries, archives and museums (LAM) is gathering momentum, driven by the breaking down of barriers between mediums in the digital age, economic necessity and the increasing appreciation of spaces in which to gather, create, discuss and learn.

Taichung, in Taiwan, has also been swayed by the philosophy that undergirds LAM projects – the rejection of the silos common in cultural institutions in favour of integrated venues. It was the city council’s brief that caught the attention of Pritzker Architecture Prize laureates Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based firm Sanaa: create an art museum-library hybrid in the middle of a park. And they did, the Taichung Green Museumbrary being the first of its kind in Taiwan, fusing two new institutions: the Taichung Public Library and the Taichung Art Museum.

“Museumbrary” may be an unwieldy portmanteau in English but the complex’s Chinese name, 臺中綠美圖 (Taichung Lu Mei Tu), is more poetic, lu meaning “green”; mei, taken from meishuguan, meaning “art museum”; and tu, taken from tushuguan, meaning “library”.

Green Museumbrary opened last December and consists of eight interconnected, semi-transparent cubes built on the grassy site of the city’s old army airport, less than 2km away from the new Taichung International Convention and Exhibition Centre, which is of a similar steel-grey hue.

An aluminium mesh covers the angular facade, granting the building a signature aesthetic while keeping an interior characterised by curves cool.

The undulating concrete pathways and open plazas on the ground level are designed to make the fused museum and library elements feel like an extension of the surrounding Central Park’s walking trails, inviting visitors to meander freely.