OMA’s Taipei Performing Arts Center is topped out

Since OMA won the competition in 2009, the Taipei Performing Arts Center in Taiwan is gradually coming to life with the recent celebration of its topping out ceremony. OMA design team leaders Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, Kris Yao and Willy Yu of KRIS YAO | ARTECH, Taipei city mayor Hau Lung-pin, and other city government representatives took part in the event.

According to OMA, the center's three theaters are meant to encourage experimental theater productions, while the Public Loop invites public engagement from both inside and outside the Center.

Façade construction is scheduled to begin this October, while the TPAC's main construction is scheduled for completion in 2015.

Have a glimpse of the project below.

Project description:

"Why have the most exciting theatrical events of the past 100 years taken place outside the spaces formally designed for them? Can architecture transcend its own dirty secret, the inevitability of imposing limits on what is possible?  In recent years, the world has seen a proliferation of performance centres that, according to a mysterious consensus, consist of more or less an identical combination: a 2,000-seat auditorium, a 1,500-seat theatre, and a black box.

Overtly iconic external forms disguise conservative internal workings based on 19th century practice (and symbolism: balconies as evidence of social stratification). Although the essential elements of theatre – stage, proscenium, and auditorium – are more than 3,000 years old, there is no excuse for contemporary stagnation. TPAC takes the opposite approach: experimentation in the internal workings of the theatre, producing (without being conceived as such) the external presence of an icon."