Danish starchitect firm BIG designed, back in 2011, a technology centre for Taipei, in Taiwan, called TEK (Technology, Entertainment and Knowledge Centre). It consists of a cube-shaped volume composed of concrete lamellas, which people can use just like a large staircase in order to go from the ground floor all the way to the building’s top. In a way, you climb the building’s façade, as it recedes and inverts unto itself. The lamellas also create informal sitting areas for the users throughout the building.
As the studio’s name suggests, this building could be said to adhere to the theory of “Bigness”, as proposed by Rem Koolhas in his important essay “Bigness, or on the problem of large”. If one were to sum it up, “Bigness” proposes that size, in itself, has an ideological program, in architecture. Buildings beyond a certain scale acquire the property of “Bigness” – they have a different way of being architecture, where a certain type of thought and reasoning is made possible, that according to Koolhas “instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields.” courtesy of big
Well, TEK3 (TEK to the cube) is without doubts, an exercise on the problem of the large. It’s a 57x57x57 meter cube, that, according to the studio: “contains an almost urban mix of programs with no obvious hierarchy”, as would be expected o...