Taichung Metropolitan Opera House — opera house
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Taichung Metropolitan Opera House

  • 1 min read
  • 24.163° N 120.641° E

Interesting facts

  • The design grew out of Toyo Ito's earlier unsuccessful competition entry for a forum of music, dance and visual culture in Ghent, Belgium.
  • Ito won the Taichung commission in a two-stage international competition in 2005, about eleven years before the theatre's official opening.
  • Its designers likened the building to a human body, its interior threaded horizontally and vertically by tube-like spaces much like organs.
  • The curved concrete surfaces total about 21,640 square metres and are 400 millimetres thick, finished largely by hand.
  • The walls were assembled from about 28,670 truss sections grouped into units of ten to twenty, a method said to be used here for the first time anywhere.
  • The Grand Theatre, the largest of the three halls, holds exactly 2,007 seats.
  • The curving structure continues onto the roof, where a sky garden is landscaped as a field of abstract peaks and valleys.
  • Ito received the Pritzker Prize in 2013, while the theatre was still under construction.
  • The project was funded by the Taichung City Government and designed with the Taiwanese firm Da-Ju Architects and Associates.

Why it is worth it

The National Taichung Theater looks as if a block of honeycomb had been sliced open: its glass-and-concrete box is pierced by curving voids that run through the building, so that walls bend continuously into floors and ceilings. Its designers called the result a "sound cave", a building without a single conventional room.

The theatre was designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito together with the engineer Cecil Balmond, then at Arup. Its structure is made of 58 interlocking catenoid units — curved surfaces of the kind formed by spinning a hanging-chain curve around an axis — which carry the building without beams. Building the free-form walls required a truss-wall method developed for this project. Construction began after a contract was signed in November 2009; the theatre opened in part in November 2014 and officially on 30 September 2016. The building covers about 57,700 square metres.

Within the flowing shell are three performance spaces: a grand theatre of around 2,000 seats, a playhouse of about 800 and a black-box studio of about 200, linked by sculpted foyers and passages that open toward the city. In 2016 the theatre became an artistic affiliate of Taiwan's National Performing Arts Center, alongside the national venues in Taipei and Kaohsiung.

Taichung, in west-central Taiwan, is one of the island's largest cities; the theatre stands in its Xitun District, a newer part of the city laid out with broad avenues and civic buildings.

Getting there

The theatre is at No. 101, Section 2, Huilai Road in Xitun District, about 5 km from Taichung's city centre. The nearest airport is Taichung International (RMQ), about 12 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

The National Taichung Theater is an opera house in the Taichung's 7th Redevelopment Zone in the Xitun District of Taichung, Taiwan. The estimated area of the structure is 57,685 square meters (620,920 sq ft). It was designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito in collaboration with Cecil Balmond at Arup AGU. It was contracted on 11 November 2009 with construction planned for 45 months. The venue had a partial opening on 23 November 2014. It was officially opened in 2016.

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24.16280, 120.64100per Wikidata