FUTURISTIC THEATRE DESIGN

The project designed by OMA is a new cultural landmark creating new possibilities in performing arts.

An ancient art form for civic participation, theatre has evolved into the modern world as a vocation of the culturally refined, with its significance in daily life diminished. Theatre space is valued for its potency for formal cultural productions, rather than its power to include and divert, and to be instantaneous.

Contemporary performance theatres increasingly become standardized: a combination of two different sized auditoria and a black box, with conservative internat operation principles for authentic work. Can a public theatre still be inclusive, accommodating the classic and the serendipitous, the highbrow and the masses, the artistic and the social-a place for the creative life of all?

Located at Taipei's Shilin Night Market marked by its vibrant street culture, the performing arts centre is architecture in limbo: specific yet flexible, undisrupted yet public, iconic without being conceived as such. Three theatres plugged into a central cube allow performing spaces to be coupled for new theatrical possibilities. The cube is lifted off the ground for a public loop to extend the street life of Taipei into the theatre. New internal possibilities and connections of the theatre generate different relationships between producers, spectators, and the public, also a critical mass that works as a fresh, intelligent icon.

The central cube consolidates the stages, backstages, support spaces of the three theatres, and the public spaces for spectators into a single and efficient whole. The theatres can be modified or merged for unsuspected scenarios and uses. The spherical 800seat Globe Playhouse, with an inner and an outer shell, resembles a planet docking against the cube.