Big Shapes with Urban Dynamics
Inside and outside OMA’s recently completed Taipei Performing Arts Center
Prelude:
"Rem, Rem! Can you look at my studio project?" the eager student yelled, pushing his way through a throng hovering around Rem, who is strolling through the architecture school.
Rem obliges, and the orbiting crowd relocates to the student's desk. He’s a tad nervous at first, but his passion soon comes through; a series of evocative process drawings and foam models are shown and explained at some length and detail. There is a short pause from Rem. Then, one utterance for the faithful:
"Architecture is either a duck or an airplane."
The audience is speechless for just a moment. Everyone gets the reference: a 1970’s-era theory that differentiated between “duck” architecture, where form signifies function (like the duck building in Flanders, NY: a duck and duck egg market), and “decorated shed” architecture, traditional buildings where signage signifies function.1
A frenzy of hushed conversations erupts as Rem walks away.2
TPAC:
In Taipei, two spheres arouse immense curiosity.3 One of them is a Chinese puzzle ball. Actually, this sphere is 23 spheres, concentrically layered ivory orbs carved in minute detail and high relief, with each layer in all the way into its pea-sized core free to spin. Encased in display at the National Palace Museum, “Ivory balls of nested concentric layers with human figures in openwork relief (AD1850-1900)” is an immaculate objectification of the Daoist phrase “鬼斧神工”, which translates to something like “supernaturally fine craft” or “the demon's axe paired with the deity's workmanship”.4 Work of God or work of the Devil, less debatable is the unfathomability that such an extraordinary treasure was formed by mere human hands.
It is 12:30pm the day after New Year’s Day, and I am gaping up at the second sphere of note. If architecture is either a duck or an airplane, I’m staring at the space station, if a supersized Sputnik digitally collided with it. It’s the Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), a captivating building by Dutch architecture firm OMA. Led by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, the building embodies the built realization of two recurring obsessions of theirs: the pure expression of interior function on the exterior, and a publicly accessible route that invites those curious enough to show up during visitor hours through much of its interior. Thanks to the latter, it is possible to experience this building in reverse: inside first, before taking in the broader surroundings. That’s what I’m doing on a cloudy January 2nd, and the following is a blend of my thoughts during and after the visit. There is (to my now increasing disappointment) no time to see a show. It’s quite a performance anyway.
Completed two and a half years ago, TPAC is the result of a scrupulous design and construction effort spanning over sixteen years. It began with a design competition, when OMA’s team had a big idea for a unique kind of performing arts facility for Taiwan. The core concept envisioned a building formed in four main pieces. Three of them are the theaters themselves, with their corresponding names and shapes: the Grand Theater (wedge), the Blue Box (box), and the Globe Playhouse (sphere). These shapes dramatically intersect with the fourth volume, a central scalloped-glass-clad cube that contains all the other spaces, including a restaurant, cafe, bookstore, offices, and plentiful breakout and rehearsal rooms. The ensemble creates a multifaceted and dynamic effect, with the projecting theaters lofted high above the ground on angled columns conspicuously reminiscent of Archigram’s “A Walking City.” The central cube lifted one story, to “absorb the street life from whatever direction it would come.”5 This is where visitors naturally wander in looking for the public access loop. But, the word “loop” doesn’t have enough “O”s in it for TPAC. So, it’s called Publicloooooop.6
So the thinking goes: certain types of theaters have historically evolved into distinctive interior shapes. Make those interior shapes abstract, pure, and blatantly apparent outside. Put a public circulation route through all the stuff. An architectural concept is born! Except it’s beyond born, it’s a fully executed adult. A confident outcast.
Notably, this isn’t the first time OMA designed a public visitor loop through a major civic building in Asia. In the mid-2000’s, there were aspirations to do an even bigger one through the China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters building in Beijing. From OMA’s online description:
The CCTV headquarters also facilitates an unprecedented degree of public access to the production of China's media: a Public Loop takes visitors on a dedicated path through the building, revealing everyday studio work as well as the history of CCTV, and culminating at the edge of the cantilever, with spectacular views towards the CBD, the Forbidden City, and the rest of Beijing.7
This Public Loop at CCTV, however, is rumored to have closed in the years since the building was completed in 2012; a rumor that seems to be tentatively supported by posts on online travel forums over the past ten years.8 What can be said for certain is that any kind of public access concept at CCTV Headquarters, if it ever existed at all, is not nearly as promoted or as wholistically integrated into the building as TPAC’s in terms of built execution. Indeed, Publicloooooop’s heavily staffed, well-functioning existence with a robust public marketing campaign as a symbolic differentiation between ROC and PRC was surely an intentional one by the Taipei government and the project’s leadership. Five days after former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022, TPAC’s grand opening commences. A media statement made at that time by TPAC CEO Austin Wang reads:
Taipei is the most open and free metropolis in the Chinese speaking world, where artists can create without concern for censorship. With freedom of expression as its foundation, Taipei Performing Arts Center has a mission to champion the multiplicity of voices in Taiwan.9
Multiplicity is a good word for Publicloooooop too. It begins in a glowing orange room, where a softly humming elevator with matching glowing side walls swiftly lifts visitors into the black unknown. A series of very dark spaces unfold: there are glimpses into the theaters, black metallic stairs softly lit through perforated risers, and several fast, lengthy escalator rides. Knowledgeable staff along the way explain more highlights of the building. A virtual section-model graphic demonstrates how the Grand Theater and the Blue Box can be combined to make one long, asymmetrical seat-facing-seat theater that’s meant to evoke an unvarnished “found space” performance setting, like an industrial warehouse.10 Further up the spiral of escalators, there are brief views into support and storage spaces full of metal utility racks holding ordinary things like spilled-over bags of paper towels.
Architecturally speaking, two loop destinations are extra memorable. The first is an outdoor, open-to-sky terrace. The walls are scalloped glass as everywhere else in the central cube, creating a fun-house effect on the surrounding city view. Immediately after the terrace, there’s a room that appears designed for the sole purpose of encouraging visitors to behold the great sphere up close. It’s a sight to see, bulging as it is. It’s clad in 3mm thick aluminum alloy panels, a material more typically used for boats. To make it, panels were cut down to a wieldy size, welded back together on the ball, then the weld seams were hand polished down for a smooth finish.11 The gridded pattern of the welded joints compliments the larger-scale pattern of expansion joints. Like a latitudinally mapped abstraction of a faraway moon.
The second high point is the glimpse inside the sphere into the Globe Playhouse theater. The vantage point from Publicloooooop is above all the box seats (higher than Iwan’s photo below (photos aren’t allowed by regular visitors in most areas)), so the view plunges both down and out, backwards. The stage is visible, and currently a dozen or so black-shirted techs drag lighting scaffolding into position. In a somewhat bizarre exhibit apparently meant to solicit visitor interaction, an invisible camera takes my photo and splices it onto a huge screen nearby: my face is now an animated clown silently shuffling around while balancing on a beach ball around an edgeless plane. (Not sure.)
Other OMA buildings go pretty wild with the bathroom design, but here they are a relatively spartan 8cm x 8cm floor-to-ceiling dark grey tile. More idiosyncratic is the cafe, because one of the Publicloooooop escalators departs right in front of the coffee counter. Escalators are ubiquitous in Asian cities, but the proximity between baristas heads and the underside of the escalator is unexpected.
Outside is last, where the building is intentionally in an oppositional dialogue with its surroundings. Taipei is known for its highly dense and visually animated streetscapes, perhaps best defined by explosions of countless Neon and LED signs. That’s especially true in the Shilin District around TPAC, where a famous night market makes for maximum urban congestion and sensory overload. (OMA actually provided electrical and water connections for the outdoor ground floor of the building to allow for food market vendors to set up, but regulations and practical challenges have prevented that from being realized so far.12 )
It’s for that reason the best photos of this building are captured from further away. Down Wenlin Road is a great vantage point, where the Globe Playhouse sphere hovers just enough above the chaos; a mysterious compliment to the wild signscape via radical visual contrast. And anyway, the toylike suspension bridge for the adjacent Jiantan MRT station was the first big-move architecture move on the block, TPAC is simply playing along.
Later, dusk will take over and the glass cube will light up with life, moving curtains, churning prisma-colored escalators, and amoeba-shifting bodies drifting into the solidly docked sphere, wedge, and box theaters. Like the portals carved in the ivory puzzle balls of Canton, Publicloooooop gives glimpses of a dark, multi-layered interior. A space station may never be contextual in the normal sense, but TPAC is exactly in the time and place it belongs.
Postscript:
It’s evening on August 4th, 2022 at TPAC’s grand opening. Rem and David have just delivered a bombshell presentation on the aspirations and execution of the building. It’s time for audience questions. There’s a pregnant silence; the audience is mostly architects, an often-shy bunch, but curious hands begin to spring up. One question with sphere top of mind breaks the silence:
“What is the initial idea of how you came up with these specific shapes for the theaters?”
The architects respond:
I think it’s very important to emphasize the rationalism of the initial decision. So it’s not that we came up with shapes, we simply looked at the different typologies of the existing kinds of theaters and simply adopted those shapes in their pure form, so there was very little imagination or invention about that…it was an important decision to keep these shapes on the outside as pure as possible, but create a double skin in them which you see in all three, so that the infrastructure and for example the special cafes and lobbies would fit within that rationale of the theaters.13
No one dares ask if this building is a duck or an airplane.
Thoughts, questions, comments, reactions? Reply to this email or send me a note: jamescarrico@substack.com. Responses get addressed in the next post.
All text and photos ©James Carrico unless otherwise cited.
Reader reactions to the previous post:
A fan of quiet cities:
Enjoyed this post very much.
Want to hear more...
Was just talking about this today while walking around Manhattan for hours... strolled all the way up from World Trade to 103rd in the UWS, weaving in and out west to east across the island. At some point, we walked across a pedestrian bridge over FDR and, despite the relatively few cars on the road at midday, we commented on HOW LOUD cars are even when there aren't many of them. Of course, New York has its own decibel problem. American cities, generally, have horrible police/emergency vehicle sirens whose European counterparts are vastly more pleasant and less obnoxious.
I figured sirens were always LOUD, being sirens and all, but you got me wondering how that shakes out quantitatively. (I remember Rome in particular having EXTREMELY loud ambulance sirens.) It would be interesting to see a chart of siren volume by nation..
Another recent Shenzhen visitor.
I think your observations were spot on, especially the dangers of pedestrians sharing the sidewalk with bikes and e-mopeds!
Glad I’m not the only one!
Keep the responses coming by replying to this email or sending a note to jamescarrico@substack.com, and thanks for reading.
Footnotes:
I know this anecdote to be true, because it was once told to me by a reader of this very Substack.
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1977. Learning from Las Vegas : The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Adopted from a claim about Chinese puzzle balls from: van Liere, Robert, and Ching-Ling Wang. 2021. “Revealing the Secrets of Chinese Ivory Puzzle Balls: Quantifying the Crafting Process Using X-Ray Computed Tomography”. The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 69 (3): 244-63. Link
Huang, Bing. 2022. “From God’s Hand to the Hand of the Artisan: The Turned Ivory Sphere and the Polyhedron in Qing China.” Studies in Chinese Religions 8 (2): 202–37. Link
Taipei Performing Arts Center, Architecture_Cultural Perspective by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, Live Presentation, 7:19, August 2nd, 2022. Link
“Taipei Performing Arts Center.” OMA. Accessed January 19, 2025. https://www.oma.com/projects/taipei-performing-arts-center.
Wang, Austin, quoted in “Taipei Performing Arts Center, hailed as an instant landmark and a symbol of Taiwan is officially open”, Association of Asia Pacific Performing Arts Centers, October 5th, 2022. Link
Craine, Debra, “Why the Taipei Performing Arts Centre is Taiwan’s newest weapon against China,” The Times, August 11, 2022. Link
Reiner-Roth, Shane, “OMA’s Taipei Performing Arts Center lifts theater spaces over a bustling night market,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 13, 2022. Link
Sim, Arthur, “Modest budget, grand ambitions: Taipei’s new $240m performing arts centre wants to be an ecosystem for the arts,” The Straits Times, November 22, 2024. Link
Taipei Performing, Koolhaas and Gianotten, 1:14:27 - 1:17:10.