About Taipei Performing Arts Center
Theater, a historical art form for public engagement, has grown into the contemporary world as a culturally sophisticated occupation, with its importance in daily life lessened. Theater space is prized for its ability to accommodate formal cultural events rather than its ability to include, distract, and be immediate. Modern performance theaters are becoming increasingly standardized: a mix of two different-sized auditoria and a black box, with conservative internal operating standards for real work. Can a public theater still be inclusive, embracing the traditional and the chance, the highbrow, the masses, the artistic and the social?a venue for everyone’s creative life"
© OMA by Chris Stowers Taipei Performing Arts Center’s Design Concept
Taipei Performing Arts Center, located amid Taipei’s Shilin Night Market, is architecture in limbo: particular but adaptable, undisturbed yet public, iconic without being planned as such. Three theaters connected to a central cube enable the coupling of performing areas for new theatrical possibilities. The cube is elevated off the ground for a Public Loop, which brings Taipei’s street activity inside the theater. New internal dramatic possibilities and linkages develop new interactions between producers, spectators, and the public and a critical mass that functions as a fresh, intelligent icon.
© OMA by Chris Stowers
The center cube combines the three theaters’ sta...