The Taipei Performing Arts Center hovers above the city, creating a public space of unprecedented architectural depth. The center’s design is organized around several deep, yet colorful involutions that push up from below and produce an unfamiliar set of relations between building and ground, along with strange scale effects. Within these involutions an elevated concourse connects the three nested theaters together.
The envelope of the building is articulated with figural pleats that emphasize the involutions and draw the eye inward. A graphic pattern is embedded into the envelope which might at one moment appears to be broken Chinese characters, and the next, 8-bit computational glitches. While the overall architectural effect is one of alien scale and origin, the project nonetheless resonates in unexpected ways with its context.
Client: City of Taipei
Type: Multi-Theater Cultural Complex
Floor Area: 39,500 m2
