Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

摘要

The National Taichung Theatre in the city of Taichung in central-western Taiwan is a complex of three performance venues-the 2,000-seat Grand Theatre,. the 800-seat Playhouse, and the 200-seat Black Box - with restaurant, cafe, and retail spaces and public areas on every floor that connect to the landscape of the adjacent park and the rooftop garden. Originally constructed by the city under the name Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, it is now operated directly by the Ministry of Culture as the National Taichung Theatre.All spaces in the complex, which we call the "Sound Cave", are formed by a fluid vertical and lateral network of tubes in three-dimensional catenoid shapes, a series of organically connected spaces that appeal to bodily feelings. The National Taichung Theatre as a whole aspires to be not only a theater complex but a site for cultural creation, realized through the fusion of many kinds of activities. Although it is a cave-like space, it differs from an ordinary cave by being divided into two zones by a thin membrane: one fluidly connected zone that is contiguous even when it is far away, and another zone that cannot be reached without breaking through a membrane, even when it is very near. New relationships are born between spaces and between people. We call the system developed to realize this kind of space and architecture the "emerging grid". It is a system of nonlinear geometry that produces complex organic spaces through the application or simple and flexible rules. Continuous curved surfaces are generated by manipulating a multi-layer two-dimensional grid. Emerging grid operations are design actions that embed architectural and theatrical functions in the Sound Cave. This nonlinear system was enabled by computers and digital technology. But the objective is to experience a primitive bodily space in a very analog way. The construction was also very analog. Before pouring the concrete, traditional steel bars were bent by hand, one by one.