The Kaohsiung Pop Music Centre in Taiwan, designed with EDDEA’s involvement, opens to visitors
Taiwan’s Pop Music Centre, set in the heart of the port of Kaohsiung where the Love River meets the sea, has opened to visitors. Arranged in three areas with several open-air leisure spaces, the complex, the fruit of a collaboration between the Spanish teams of EDDEA and Made In, sets out to become a leading creative and leisure hub for the city.
The scheme covers 11 hectares conceived for the everyday enjoyment of local people: designed for daily walks and created for coming together, in short, designed to be woven into the heart of the city. The project stems from the first prize in an international competition awarded to the Spanish team Made In in 2011, and it is one of EDDEA’s greatest challenges.
Aiming to create a fabric that would become part of the city’s daily life and offer spaces for activity to the people of Taiwan, EDDEA revisited the concept and the idea as first outlined, drawing on diagrams of pedestrian flows and facilities. It was then that the decision was taken to develop a dock with new uses, organised in three areas adapted to the different conditions of their surroundings.
“Our first contribution,” the team explains, “was to review the entire concept to ensure the technical and constructional feasibility of the whole complex. The most visible result of EDDEA’s work is the group of tall buildings. The initial diagrams showed two separate buildings, each with an auditorium attached. Our proposal was to confront the programme by combining the two into a single building, embracing them back to back and working the section in detail.”
The EDDEA team also points out that “its symbolic character does not come from the fact that the towers might look like waves or that the intervention might resemble a seascape. We want it to gain that character through the use the people of Kaohsiung make of it, and by gradually becoming part of the city as a place full of life and of possibilities for use and enjoyment.”
Inspired by the sea
Inspired by the waves of the sea and strategically placed, the Music Museum and its auditoriums, one indoor for 5,000 people and one outdoor designed to hold up to 12,000, form one of the most striking parts of the site. This area is crowned by two towers, one 113 metres and the other 83 metres high.
The project also responds to the Taiwanese love of food circuits, with a night market that draws visitors around the clock, and to its location, linked to the design of the Maritime Museum beside the bay.
The third and final area acts as a link between the main access and exit routes in the area, from the ferry terminal to the seafront promenade, as well as other arrival points. An internal connection more than 25 metres high, in the form of ramps and escalators, ties all the areas together.
