In 2015 the mayor of Taipei stood above this bizarre and misshapen construction site and
threatened to “strangle every single one” of the contractors if it could not be completed.
Despite this public and rather impassioned threat,
it would be another seven years before the building finished.
USD $80M over budget, a decade under construction,
and one of the most important cultural buildings in Asia.
This is the story of the Taipei Performing Arts Center. The building that nearly broke Taipei.
You may have noticed Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately.
If you look back to this time last year you’ll remember former US
speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took a trip to the island nation.
It was the highest-profile visit by an American politician to Taiwan in 25
years - and in response Beijing launched a barrage of joint military exercises.
It was a big deal.
Against this backdrop, at the same time as Pelosi’s visit,
the long gestating Taipei Performing Arts Center finally opened.
Some would see it as a chaotic beginning for a building with a long and chaotic
history. But the defiance of Pelosi’s visit - whether or not you agreed with it - and
the opening of this theatre are more closely connected than you would think.
In order to understand this, we have to rewind the clock. Back to 2008.
Taipei launched an international competition to find a design for a set of theatres to be
built on the site of the Shilin Night Market. These buildings would be an
icon for culture and help legitimise the tiny nation on the world stage.
Think of what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao,
or the Opera House for Sydney. A building - especially a cultural
building with government money - is never just a building. It’s a statement.
Dutch architecture studio OMA had no interest in chasing icons. Nor did it
want to create a wholly generic theatre. So it set about creating something else.
With no expectation of winning the competition the architects
designed with absolute freedom. This is probably why they won.
So what we did is kind of from the beginning,
take a risk. And I think that's more what we did. We took a risk in the competition design.
If they really wanted to have a theatre that was kind of based on a generic brief, then our
solution was not the most obvious solution. Then one of the other 140 entries would have been.
The first thing they did was decide to keep the night markets, seeing them as
a vital part of the city and a unique way to combine so-called high culture and low culture.
Basically, you have to understand Taipei, Taipei is a very energetic city and the
Taiwanese are the nation that sleeps latest, that goes to sleep latest. So the nightlife
is a very important part of Taipei and this and the location of the theatre was in the heart of
the Taipei nightlife night market. And so that was deeply exciting because it meant that a theatre,
typically a semi elitist entity, could be located in the heart of the most popular part of the city.
Not only did they keep the night markets - they drew inspiration from them.
And so we got fascinated by the kind of cooking because
the kitchens have enormous capacity on very small little territories.
This was exactly what we wanted to also achieve in the theatre itself.
Their performing arts centre packs a lot into a small space.
The Globe Playhouse - an 800-seat spherical theatre,
designed to resemble a planet docking against the cube.
The Grand Theatre - a 1,500-seat space.
And the Blue Box - which will be used for more experimental shows.
Instead of giving each theatre its own back of house and its own entrance,
these features are brought together.
What we do is actually we combine the stages in the cube around that in a very efficient way.
Lifting the theatres up above the ground leaves space outside free for
public use. This unorthodox method then created an opportunity for invention.
The Grand Theatre and Blue Box could be connected, creating a super theatre 100 metres in length.
We see that in Taipei and in Taiwan, everything operates in the most
efficient way and not necessarily in the most lush and luxurious way. It's kind
of a city that is quite rough, that this kind of kept its own identity.
You discover that a city that somehow miraculously has escaped the fate of complete gentrification
and in that sense, its authenticity is really tangible and really irresistible.
This was an ambitious project. And the challenges to build it were immense,
the building is essentially a central volume with the theatres floating out at varying angles.
There are cantilevers, enormous domes, and earthquakes to worry about.
In order to allow for architectural freedom - and to prevent these floating spaces from
falling to the ground - the faces of the central cube were turned into a
stiff braced steel box carrying the building’s lateral loads and much of the gravity force.
This worked in combination with columns beneath the auditoria to
support and stabilise the three projecting volumes.
Taipei is famously prone to earthquakes - sitting right in the middle of the ring
of fire - so the arts centre had to be engineered to be earthquake proof.
The whole superstructure is base-isolated - essentially meaning the building is lifted
up and separated from its base. In the event of an earthquake the ground will
shake but those in the building will only feel about 40% of its force.
The globe theatre itself cantilevers 26 metres from the main cube. This is accomplished by
three-dimensional space trusses occupying the space between the auditorium and outer shell.
Despite its complexity, this globe theatre - a modern nod to
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London - was designed with functionality.
Because of its unique shape audience members sit in a curved plane closer to the stage,
allowing more visitors a better experience of the theatre.
That the energy that comes from the stage is absorbed by everybody in the room instead of
only the people that are more up front. And by creating this double shell around theatre,
we could, of course, bring people a lot closer to the stage.
This democratisation continues in other elements of the building’s design. There is a public
loop that runs through the entirety of the building allowing anyone to
come and see the inner workings of the theatre at any time without a ticket.
So the whole route is going to a nice cafe and to a nice kind of platform
on the roof to overlook Taipei. But it is also going through the rehearsal spaces.
You see the offices where the people work to kind of program the theatre.
It goes to a technical grid so that you can see
how it actually is operated and how it supports what is happening on stage.
It goes past the backstage so that you see what is all
needed to, to actually have the front stage be exciting. And then it also passes through
the Globe theatre where you can really look at the performance obviously behind glass so
that you can disturb it and you will hear it and you can see it without a ticket.
The whole project was due to complete by 2013, but construction didn’t even start until 2012.
It even bankrupted the main contractor and by 2015 mayor Ko Wen-je delivered his infamous threat.
The budget soon ballooned from USD $120M to $226M.
Then the pandemic hit and the lead architects Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten had to
finish their arts centre from Europe, via Zoom.
I have done the delivery with a camera on the helmet of one of my employees going
through every corner for two days behind the screen. But I couldn't physically be
there because Taiwan didn't allow any foreigners in for a long time.
It's actually a very strange situation because although in the beginning we were deeply involved
almost with constructing the thing from the earth, it become virtual at the end.
But come 2022 the project was finished and opened
to the public. This small theatre with a big vision. A democratised version
of theatre built next to the hub of the city’s nightlife. A theatre for everyone.
Of course, the relationship with China being part of Greater China is a sensitive one. But
in in Taiwan there is a kind of freedom in a very clear way to debate that or to discuss it,
at least in especially in the theatre and through art.
That's kind of voice we wanted to be able to provide from our theatre and that and
we are not in that tension. We are not in that debate. So you need to kind of be collaborating
with people that are to enlighten you what we what you can do with that in a building design.
While China flew its planes overhead Taiwan opened its theatre with the
hope that culture could be an even greater weapon.
A building is never just a building. Like
the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Opera House in Sydney.
This building is about freedom and it’s about expression. It’s about the
Taiwenese identity standing in defiance. Defiance of gravity, defiance of budget,
defiance of the chaos around it.
It may look bizarre and disjointed,
or maybe beautiful and daring. But it’s definitely not constrained.
This building may have nearly broken Taipei, but it could make this city too.
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