Designed by OMA, the huge Taipei Performing Arts Center will open in Summer 2022 and it will become the new headquarters for Taiwan’s numerous performing arts groups, embracing a variety of genres, as contemporary dance, opera, children’s theater, cutting-edge theater, puppet theater and musical theater. It will also serve as a laboratory for cross art-forms experimentations.

The project, situated in the lively Shilin District, has been led by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten in collaboration with local architecture firm Kris Yao | Artech and the engineering company Arup. The 59,000 sqm complex comprises three theaters: an 800-seat spherical Proscenium, a 1500-seat Grand Theater, and an 800-seat Multiform Theater – or ‘Blue Box’ – which is designed to host the most experimental performances. The Grand Theater and the Multiform Theater can be also coupled becoming a 2,300-seat ‘Super Theater’. In this context David Gianotten said ‘Taipei Performing Arts Center inspir[es] unimagined theatrical possibilities’.

‘Taipei has a unique kind of creative energy that extends to every aspect of life’, stated Koolhaas and the project, to dialogue with this characteristic, features a public loop that bring people – with or without a ticket – to walk through the building and see performances and technical spaces usually hidden to the audience.