20 NEWS MIXED USE


Bringing Taiwan’s Times Square to life


Images © MVRDV


What MVRDV describe as their “bold and ambitious” design for the Taipei Twin Towers, designed as part of a consortium led by Nan Hai Development, has been selected to “revitalise the central station area of Taiwan’s capital.” The design is characterised by a “pile of blocks that create a vertical urban neighbourhood,” said MVRDV, and by a number of interactive media facades. These “artistically communicate the diverse programme contained by those blocks,” said the firm. The aim of the project is to provide a “vibrant and charismatic destination that re-establishes the central station area of Taipei as the city’s premier location for shopping, working, and tourism –a Times Square for Taiwan.”


The site is currently occupied by the city’s Main Station, which serves the city’s railway, airport lines and metro networks, and a number of underused parks and plazas. The new buildings will be built over the top of the existing station, combining retail, offices, two cinemas, and two hotels; meanwhile the plazas will be unified and redeveloped.


The neighbourhood surrounding the building includes a mixture of small, human-scale buildings and larger towers. MVRDV comments on how its proposal combines different scales: “When experienced up close, the main visual impact of the buildings will be provided by the bases of the towers, comprising connected stacks of small blocks housing retail.” Each are proposed to house different retail outlets and “thus contain different identities.” The towers are 337 and 280 metres, housing offices, cinemas, and two hotels: one crowning the east tower targeted at “young, trendy travellers” and the other at the top of the west tower focusing on the luxury market. At ground level, the design proposes a sunken plaza, with a variety of interventions inspired by the history of the site. Structures marking the former locations of the original station and plaza and some old houses will turn this plaza in the centre of Taipei “into a kind of archaeological study,” said the architects. These structures will include pergolas, as well as ‘tribunes’ to allow


WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK


ADF FEBRUARY 2019


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132