TAIPEI.- The 7th of August 2022 Taipei Performing Arts Center opens its doors! Inside Outside developed - in close collaboration with OMA -landscape and interior concepts and interventions. This included the interior concept for the theatres, rehearsal rooms, and the design of the public plaza, its surrounding landscape and streetscape, terrace and roof gardens and two large-scale theatre curtains. Click here to see a movie of the theatre.

Birdseye view on the landscape and roof terraces. Two raised gardens, with individual trees like character actors on a stage, flank the public plaza on both sides. The strategically chosen local trees will together form a shading vegetal roof. Connective paths and circular ‘rooms’ are cut-out of these two ‘stage gardens’, providing intimate places for shelter, relaxations and social interaction. The black & white stripe pattern of the public plaza – with its integrated water and electricity system - offers space for markets and festivities and invites everyone to enter the building at its dynamic circular heart.

The basic concept of the interior design is to let the ‘tough’ urban materials and graphics flow seamlessly into the public spaces of the building, and to differentiate specific areas by using one monochrome colour for each area, as if each area is ‘dipped’ into one can of paint: the theatres dipped in grayish-blue, the back-stage and tower in dark brown, the rehearsal spaces in pink, the green rooms in green.

The large (13 x 20 m) stage curtain follows the overall color concept of the room and forms the fourth wall in the space. Made of heavy glass fiber weave, it falls elegantly, while transmitting the subtle reflectiveness of its surface towards the public. Thin transparent strips generate un-expected light effects when in movement and lit from behind, and peeks onto the stage when lit from the front.

Inside Outside developed a new form of stage curtain: three separate stretched membranes that slide across the edge of the stage both in vertical and horizontal direction, their combined positions creating endlessly varied stage openings. They also lend themselves perfectly for light projections and shadow play.