Taipei Performing Arts Center: a theater that’s a part of people’s lives

In commissioning the Taipei Performing Arts Center, the City of Taipei was aiming to attract people to the theatrical arts and inspire minds. Designed by OMA architects Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, the complex is in Taipei’s bustling Shilin Night Market neighborhood, an area known for its vibrant street culture, a deeply entrenched part of the life of the city. The project is intended to restore theater’s original role as an ancient artform involving community participation and inclusion, something quite different from the cultural stereotypes and formalisms it’s taken on over time.

 

Three theaters in one

As the performing arts have grown increasingly formalized, theater architecture has become standardized, closed off from life around them as cultural temples only accessible to the few. As a public building intended to host popular culture, art, and creativity, the Taipei Performing Arts Center has turned this on its head.

To achieve it, the building has been lifted off the ground to create a street-level plaza. A Public Loop then connects the plaza with the volumes above, running through them to form a pathway that brings the life out on the street into the theater. It’s a show in itself for people without a ticket and an invitation for them to take part in the life of the theater, walk through it, explore it, and access areas that are typically hidden from the public. Shows can even be viewed from the Public Loop as well as the behind-the-scenes spaces.

The center has three separate theaters arranged around a central cube, which makes it possible to modify and combine them. The Globe Playhouse is a spherical room that seats 800. It was conceived as a planet propped up against the façade, whose proscenium is formed by the sphere’s intersection with the cubic space. The Grand Theater seats 1500 people in an asymmetrical volume that creates an interplay with the offset parallel planes of a rectangular prism. Finally, the 800-seat Blue Box is for experimental performances. The Grand Theater and Blue Box can be joined by the central cube to create a super theater, a unique space offering unprecedented flexibility in terms of configurations and set design.

 

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All-round architecture

Unlike more traditional theaters, the Taipei Performing Arts Center has no discernable front or back. From outside, it appears as a series of opaque, silent, and mysterious volumes that interpenetrate via the animated and luminous central cube, covered in corrugated glass. The volumes generate asymmetries and geometries interrupted by the spherical element that houses the Globe Playhouse. This almost “spatial” volume is grafted onto the façade and is supported by two inclined pillars that converge towards the center of the sphere.

The theater is a new means for bringing people closer together socially through the performing arts and to experience different forms of theater. As Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA, says:

“When we first visited Taipei for the competition, we felt it was a city with an appetite for experimentation. This building is a response to that discovery. We put three traditional theaters together in a way that offers theater makers completely new opportunities to conceive shows and performances.”

 

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