Abitare Habitat Landscape design Mecanoo in Taiwan
Mecanoo in Taiwan
Herbert Wright
Kaohsiung, Taiwan, hosts one of the largest Performing art centres in the world since last October. And a new green transport hub is in construction that will transform the city centre. Both of these are Mecanoo projects, and are the first of a series
Cargo ship aesthetic When Mecanoo entered the competition to design the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in 2006, Mecanoo founder Francine Houben, made her first visit to Taiwan. She found "a very informal country, with a vibrant street life that was inspiring and would influence how we perceived our designs in the country". She also noted how the banyan tree, a native plant across south and south-east Asia, created organic spaces beneath its crown, which spread across multiple trunks. Cooling breezes blow through them. The banyan, too, became a key ingredient in Mecanoo's competition design.
Go to the gallery
It won in 2007, and when construction began in 2010, Mecanoo opened its Kaohsiung office. The building is vast. Its roof is the world's largest of any performing art centre, and maps directly over its 225 metres by 160 metres footprint. It shelters and unifies a complex three-storey volume with four auditoria, and undulates gently, rising into small hills above three of them. On one side, the roof dips down in a dramatic gesture, while on the opposite side it warps down to the ground to create a fifth performance venue – a half-bowl with amphitheatre seating surrounded by green roof, which can seat 2,000. On the opening night, the stage faced outward to Weiwuying Park, to an audience of perhaps 13,000. The roof forms a canopy above the Banyan Plaza, a 17,446 m2 cavern which opens on every side of the site and from which volumes rise and curve out, like banyan trunks. One accommodates a lobby with a graceful white ribbon balustrade rising up two floors, while the others accommodate the venues.
One of the volumes accommodates a lobby with a graceful white ribbon balustrade rising up two floors. (ph. Iwan Baan)
The plaza is an informal public space, inviting the vibrancy of Taiwanese street life. It rises gently one storey across the volume, between curved walls made of 2,320 steel plates, welded together by local and Dutch shipbuilders, giving an aesthetic which Houben says is "cargo ship, not luxury yacht". Across the top floor is the Crown Plaza. This fluid foyer space is cut by glazed tubes bringing light in and on to the plaza below. It connects all the venues internally. The largest is the 2,236-capacity Opera House and the smallest the 436-capacity Recital Hall. The 1,210-capacity Playhouse has seats in Mecanoo's hallmark blue. The most impressive auditorium is the champagne-coloured Concert Hall, holding 1,981 in tiers around the stage, like Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie. It has a double-organ with 9,085 pipes, and a 22-tonne acoustic canopy suspended at adjustable height depending on the music. The park offers the distance needed to grasp the arts centre's alien form and sheer scale, but close up, its open structure and curves make it inviting. While it puts Kaohsiung on the world map in arts and architecture, Mecanoo are also transforming the heart of the city itself.
One of the auditoria. (ph. Iwan Baan)
A garden on the station The Japanese colonial regime built a station building in 1940, but it has been moved almost 100 metres and restored as an exhibition space. The new station has parallels with Mecanoo's station in Delft, the practise's base. Kaohsiung has also buried its railway tracks in tunnel, enabling a new multi-level station with a 13,000 sqm sunken plaza. It sits under a field of pebble-like ellipses scattering light across a dome ceiling which spans 72 metres. There's plenty of room for a proposed 8m-high Buddha to be installed in this station hall. The station concourse opened in October, but this is just one seventh of the final project, which should complete in 2024. It already connects to the Metro and will include local and national bus stations. The canopy above the station will be a green roof – a garden open to all with a view down into the station. A cycle highway meanders through it and slopes down either side into a 10 km green boulevard above the railway line. New hotel and commercial blocks will rise around this new mobility hub.
Train and metro station, Kaohsiung
The sunken plaza sits under a field of pebble-like ellipses scattering light across a dome ceiling which spans 72m. (ph. Shawn Liu)
Three future projects So far, Mecanoo's Taiwan projects have been characterised by the fluidity of their form, but future projects are different. On Kaohsiung's new green boulevard, Mecanoo has drawn on their long experience of affordable housing in the Netherlands to design 245 residential units, in a series of white and green tile-clad mid-rise towers that incorporate greenery, with community facilities and small retail to create street life. Construction starts in 2019.
Kaohsiung Social Housing, Kaohsiung. (Courtesy Mecanoo architecten)
In Tainan, another major city, the Tainan Public Library is a composition of stacked levels which are wider with height. The top floor is wrapped with vertical louvres, evoking Taiwanese window frames. With its rectangular forms and distinctive facade screen, it has echoes of Mecanoo's iconic Library of Birmingham (2013). Tainin's Library is a joint design with local practice MAYU and will complete in 2019.
Tainan Public Library, Tainan.
In Taichung the site is being cleared for the Green Corridor, a linear park along 1.7 km of disused rail line along a dyke, a physical barrier in Taiwan's second largest city. This Green Corridor will make the barrier a connector, as well as a leisure destination.
Green Corridor, Taichung.
cultural spaces|infrastructures|Mecanoo|social housing|stations|Taiwan
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