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.
In July 2019 the Vilnius Concert Hall competition jury began its deliberations to identify a suitable design for this major performing arts project. As one might have anticipated, two of thejurors on the seven member panel, Ole Gustavsen (Snohetta) and Andreas Cukrowicz (Nachbaur Architekten) had won high profile competitions for similar music center projects—in Oslo and Munich.The jury was confronted with a formidable task, as the competition, organized according to UIA regulations and anonymous in its format, had attracted 248 entries from around the world. For this one-stage competition, the organizers listed the following evaluation criteria, whereby the order of the criteria was not to reflect any priority:
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.
Memorials to commemorate atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II have taken many forms. Holocaust museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. by Pei Cobb Freed or the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, all endeavor to paint a broad picture, including narratives covering most of the major events and sites. Former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald have been frequent tour destinations. In the case of Buchenwald, the local city of Weimar has placed pictures of “Witnesses” throughout the downtown area as a reminder of the Nazi legacy.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
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