Taichung Cultural Center

Museum / Library design proposal

Historical Site

The site was located inside an old wine factory in central Taichung City - a major metropolitan city in middle of Taiwan. The wine factory was started in 1914 by Japanese and then taken over by R.O.C. government after the end of the World War II, 1945. The full street block site occupied 5.6 hector area near the Taichung railway station. The factory stopped brewing on 1998, since the function was taken over by a newly built factory in neighbor district. After the site was abandoned several years, Taichung city government started to thinking of taking advantage of it. It has big open space with historical factory buildings that rarely exist in current central area with such convenient public transportation around. Therefore, Taichung Cultural Center project was brought in to this special site. By preserving the designated historical factory buildings, the new project needs to fit the new programs in cooperation with these original ones.

Essence of Cultural Center

Since the main purpose of this design is to let people getting to learn more stories and information of Taichung city, the design idea is captured from how tourist exploring a newly visited city. First, they turn into the recorded guidelines, such as guide books or internet blogs. After they had puzzled a tentative image of target city, they start to move on and experience the city throughout 3 dimensional transportation tools. By translating this movement into the programming layout idea, most of the functional program like cinema and general displays are set underground just like the functional transportation facilities. Several spots that could be the visitor attractions come up to the ground level and become visible volumes for distributing the people flows in the site and catch their eyes in different point of views.