National Performing Arts Center, Kaohsiung

Architecture:
Zaha Hadid Architects

Design:
Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher

Project Leader:
Yi-Ching Liu

Project Team:
Jaime Bartolome, Paulo Flores, Ta-Kang Hsu, Swati Sharma, William Tan, Matthew Wong, Zhi Wang, Feng Xu, Kane Yanagawa, Ting Ting Zhang

”When I began my career as an architect, I decided to that I wanted to make life easier for people. Our most important task today is to take care of public space. These areas in cities and towns should not be reserved for the few. This is where people from all layers of society should be able to meet. It is all about what kind of future we want.
Whether we want to see a society that is culturally integrated or a society that is segregated”
Zaha Hadid.

Situated on the Kaohsiung city / county border in Taiwan, along the developing MRT public transportation line, and between the Zhongzheng Stadium and Fongshan City Sports Park, the pro¬posed site for a National Kaohsiung Performing Arts Center has the potential to catalyze the development of a more public, and international Kaohsiung City. As a recognized base of industrial commerce in Taiwan, Kaohsiung City’s infrastructure is already well established. With the inclusion of the new MRT station on the proposed site and the establishment of the Metropolis Cultural & Artistic Belt along the line’s east / west trajectory, the situation of the National Kaohsiung Performing Arts Center, with a major pedestrian path connecting to the station, reflects the significance of the MRT as a major life line for the project. Simultaneously the main pedestrian path’s adjacencies with the proposed commercial district, as well as the open boundary around the sites perim¬eter serve not only to establish an open connection to the green scapes of the Zhongzheng Stadium to the North and Fongshan City Sports Park to the South, but as a means of filtering traffic into the site along this public “green band”.

To achieve an open green connection while concurrently filtering public pro¬gression through the site, the Voronoi diagram was adopted as a method of organization. The Voronoi algorithm produces a close packing of convex do¬mains based on a given point distribution. The pattern is akin to many self-or¬ganizing processes in nature and gives a strong sense of organic coherence. In evaluating the assignment of the local “treasured” trees, historic buildings and site boundaries with Voronoi calculations and using the resulting pattern as an organizational design principal, we are able to respect the current situ¬ation of the site and cultivate a strong affiliation between the building and the surrounding park-scape.

The overall form of the building itself seems to grow out of the patterned land¬scape, merging at the top, to form a canopy that shades the public plaza be¬low. By developing the form with nurbs surface geometry, based on the cluster of voronoi shapes that comprised the building, the voronoi pattern is expressed in all the elements of the façade system. Built around a structural system ex¬tracted from the UV geometry of a nurbs surface, the structure / glass façade system in the elements running up from the ground to the cladding and ventila¬tion systems in the roof shell all reflect the voronoi diagram.