The Sound Cave

Legendary Toyo Ito puts life into the National Taichung Theater as he anatomises the entire fluid structure and breathes soul into it.

- Blanca Escoda Agusti

Inaugurated in September 2016 after no less than 45 months of construction planning, the National Taichung Theater, Taiwan, is a statement to contemporaneity, or rather, to the contemporary experience of borderless living. The most conceptually singular aspect of the building is the confidence in which it rejects structuring the space with walls, floors and ceilings, thus, actively dismissing the basic concepts on how to organise and think of space. The result is a building that propels the visitor to have a very similar experience one might have when adventuring into the virtual world. Maybe non-existent.

Designed by the Pritzker Prize winner – Japanese conceptual architect Toyo Ito, the building has a 400mm thick concrete curved surface of approximately 21,640 m 2 . The structure is divided into different catenoid units, amounting to 58 in total. It has been built with the truss-wall construction method, used here for the very first time worldwide, making of this Opera House an unquestionable unprecedented building.

Toyo Ito himself explains, “The National Taichung Theatre is not just a building that houses the opera. The entire architecture itself is an opera”. And this is precisely how one should look at and understand this remarkable building. It is erected to be one-of-a-kind, standing at a league of its own; unfazed by anything else the world throws at it.