Anticipating a Second Stage: The New Taipei City Museum of Art Design Competition
by Stanley Collyer
Finalist entry by Kengo Kuma and Associates
To arrive at a design for a new art museum in Taipei, the organizers decided to allow the participants more flexibility than usual in devising their planning concepts for the new institution. According to the design brief, “the planning and design guidelines in this program are for reference only. The designer must propose…new possibilities for modern art museums, define the exhibition method, and propose new space requirement, then proceed (in) the planning and design based on the new required spaces and design guidelines.”
The Jury Process
It is not unusual to find different personnel involved in different stages of the selection process. Normally this change of faces occurs after an RfQ screening committee process, whereby a limited number of finalists are shortlisted for a single-stage presentation of proposals. In this case, the competition was open to international participants, with a first-stage jury made up of local design professionals. In the second stage—to be decided in October—we will see three outside jurors, Peter Cook (UK), Norihiko Dan (Japan), and Julien de Smedt (Denmark) joining four local professionalson that jury, the latter being in the majority. Will their enthusiasm for the selected finalists rise to the level of that exhibited by the first stage jurors?
As for the finalists, all three had quite different approaches, albeit leaning heavily on former precedents. The choices varied from linear and vertical to historicism as design mechanism. The finalists were:
Federico Soriano Pelaez, Spain
Peter Boronski / Jean-Loup Baldacci, New Zealand/France
Kengo Kuma / Kengo Kuma & Associates, Japan
Five honorable mentions were:
James Law Cybertecture International Holding Limit (Hong Kong) Sung Goo Yang with Oscar Kang (USA)
Ian Yan-Wen Shao with JR-Gang Chi, Ar-Ch Studio (R.O.C.)
Composed of a layered, undulating configuration tied together by the topography, one wonders if the jury had the firm, Foreign Office, or even Zaha Hadid in mind when it selected this design for the final round. Despite such superficial comparisons, this entry suggests a strong connection to a park-like setting, a place to be visited on weekends and holidays with the entire family. A landlocked version of the Oslo Opera House?
Federico Soriano Pelaez
This is a very theoretical scheme, based in part on bits and pieces of past museum plans. How these isolated parts can all fit together in a cohesive whole is something the upcoming jury will undoubtedly wrestle with. This proposal raises many questions, not the least of which will be circulation. Another may be its low profile, with a significant part of it being located underground. This entry is notable in that its presentation is completely in black and white—not one color rendering. How often do you see that in this computer age?
Kengo Kuma / Kengo Kuma & Associates
Here the similarity to Frank Gehry can hardly be avoided, apart from the material nature of the facade wrapping around a normal structure. As icon, this entry represents a truly strong urban statement. Sustainability is high on the list of priorities here; but lurking in the background will always be the question of budget viability, that is, does the City have unlimited resources to realize this project?
At this writing, we did not have access to the honorable mentions; but numerous non-winners have already begun to pop up on the internet as the results of this first round have become public.
The Rise in the City Housing Competition in the African country of Lesotho presented many similarities with student competitions that have occurred over the past decades, the main link being the presence of mentors as advisers to the team(s) who were designing the entries. One of the most famous examples of this was the winning design for the Vietnam Memorial Competition by Maya Lin, who was enrolled at the time in a studio course at Yale University. In that case it was also a case of students competing against professionals. Lin’s design just happened to find favor with the jury.
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
The features of a truly international competition were quite in evidence in Prague's SMÍCHOV School search for an ideal elementary school design: the event attracted 66 entries from around the world, and the winners were a team from Canada and Poland. The sponsors went so far as to even estimate the number of hours spent by all of the architects who submitted entries for the competition (58,800). One can only imagine what that number might have been for the Helsinki Guggenheim competition, which attracted 1,715 entries.
Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (PCP) in collaboration with China Southwest Architectural Design and Research Institute Corp Ltd. has prevailed over a strong field to win the competition for a Natural History Museum in Chengdu, China. The other finalists included Zaha Hadid Architects, Sutherland Hussey Harris, Nihon Sekkei, Valode & Pistre, and FUKSAS.
Garage Screen, a program of film screenings on contemporary art and culture, was launched in 2012 and introduces viewers to notable examples of Russian and foreign feature films, documentaries, and experimental films. Since its inception, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has selected and shown films and videos examining issues of contemporary art and culture in all their manifestations, rare documentary films on the lives and lifestyles of prominent and little-known artists, musicians, architects, and performing artists, as well as films about the creation of exhibitions and works of art.
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