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Taipei Performing Arts Center proposal by Francois Blanciak Architect
28
Apr 2009
Earlier this year, we featured the Taipei Performing Arts Center proposal of Morphosis, NL Architects, and Abalos+Sentkiewicz, in a competition that was finally won by OMA.
Today, we show you Francois Blanciak Architect’s proposal. As a cultural reference to a taiwanese aboriginal construction technique using slabstone heaps, the project similarly piles up 4 slabstones (3 containing theaters, 1containing administrative spaces) in a cairn-like structure. In order to emphasize the public nature of the building, it is elevated on top of a wide upper plaza, upon a plinth that liberates the movement of pedestrians on the ground level.
Seen at designboom. More images after the break.
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45 comments »
yay, a giant birkenstack
things are getting absolutly ridiculous nowdays!
this is bad on so many levels….literally.
wow…is there a flush button?
funny project…ahhh…
i mean..if u want some kind of pebbles..make them flatter and about the same volume…then it could be interesting…please!!
‘this is bad on so many levels….literally.’ yes.
Thankfully, this project will never be constructed.
haha, what a pile of…
In a way, I’m impressed.
These architects are so bold that they just couldn’t wait any longer to throw this to public. Congratulations, you successfully surprised me.. just in a bad way.
i gree
WHY?
well… it could be worse…or not..
did they used these drawings to present at the competition? i can understand why they lost..
very rarely does the day come when a project ushers in a new paradigm for architecture….
…that day is not today.
hahaha…this is truly entertaining….good joke
Biggest Dog`s poo!!!… Direct to guiness record
yikes, nurbs are corrupting architects…big, smooth and shiny does not automatically make someting avante garde
IF i tried to pass this off as a project in my school of architecture, I would get laughed out of the place.
Why should professionals be allowed to get away with it???
horrible. Go back to school!!!!!!!!!!!!!!First class please!
looks more like animal droppings than stones…this architects needs to stop insulting the world and its inhabitants with its mental detritus. what makes the cairn’s so impressive is that there is NO F’ing structure….its beauty is derived from the balancing of seemingly incompatible forms/shapes. Not the invisible weaving of a massive super structure to create false forms. This is just nonsense wrapped in stone to look like stone. When will these idiots wake up and understand that the world they are longing to cling to has long since past them by. where is the responsibility in the design of such a farce.
Somebody had to do it…enjoy.
https://ilocker.bsu.edu/users/mdgibson/WORLD_SHARED/architectural_defecation.jpg
I didn’t know turds could have a patina
that is absolutely ridicules.
Morphosis had the best proposal.
It just a funny idea.
It’s incredibly hard for our profession to get the public to take us seriously and this is exactly the reason why.
They have an exploded axon of freakin ROCKS!!! WTF?
what a joke!..i thought that we had enough jokes with gehry´s,calatrava´s,zaha´s etc..with this kind of works in a few years the world will become in a worldwide disneyworld or something like that
this is just a giant Cairn…
Cairn at Wikipedia
At first thought…the project is a joke, but Blanciak is definitely creating(on paper) some interesting work. He’s worked closely with Gehry, Eisenmann, and BIG. He also wrote the great book SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms.
My major problem with his projects are his laughable ignorance to scale. But, lots of well regarded architects use this same strategy (BIG, SANAA, etc). I don’t think his projects can be fairly judged until they are fully realized with facades,materials,and detail work. The thing I like about his work is that hes promoting “less talk” and less architect-specific theory. Simple ideas that non-architects can easily understand.
I do enjoy his observation tower project
http://www.blanciak.com/Incheon3.html
bentply, at your first thought you were right!!! It IS a joke… any function can be designed in any space. The “knot” tower is fabulous… I like it too in exactly the same way I like a ticket booth inside an elephant shaped kiosk and fast food restaurant inside a giant hamburger… but is this what architecture is about?
This project is not creative at all. It is only pretending to be. We should always push the envelope but all I see here is a design that shouldve be scrapped.
Looks like Zygmunt Rytka’s photography… Ridiculous as a building…
Divertido desafio… mejor que las “piedras” de Medellín
Provocation is a form of getting public attention and the next project. In that sense: well done Francois.
hey!!! what’s the matter???
you’re being radicals…
it’s just another style!!!!
can you guys open your little minds to new architecture???
we left behind the radicalism…isn’t it???
这就是一坨屎！
Great! you guys are very courageous to showing this…it has great potential, BUT you didn’t took it to the next level.
what is that? a new duck? i dont call that architecture, not even mimetism. it’s just a cut and paste to another scale!
and sorry, style is just not about form…
Очень не нравится. Отвратительно. Это не архитектура.
It is not like it. Disgusting. This is not architecture.
N I M O D O
o well.., just a personal opinion; it so tempting that i’m afraid some giant kids would throw another giant rocks to that stack, then there u go, scattered theaters.. now that could be interesting..
The competition is baffling. After all, the project that won is a tennis ball held up against a shoebox with toothpicks (one guesses that the toothpicks are obligatory because the engineering challenge of a suspended sphere and a box would have just been too much). The Morphosis proposal is equally dadaist and equally pointless.
Out of the proposals this one is, actually, the most coherent. At least you might suspend disbelief for ten-seconds and think yeah, it kinda looks like a cairn – stack of stone-things, or something else. On some level this structure at least conjures references and incites opinion. To that extent it is successful.
Terry Glenn Phipps
I see hardly any connection between the blob-like exterior with the (for the most part) rectilinear interior. What does Aborigine construction have to do with preforming arts anyways?
Isn’t it time to close this unequivocally negative sounding discussion panel and focus on providing a positive feedback to better projects than this one?
LOOKS LIKE A GIANT PETRIFIED TURD
this reminds me of the dad on Clarissa Explains it All, he always designed really funny EXTREMELY literal things like this… the idea of pebbles doesn’t bother me so much as the idea of circulation.. that’s a shit ton of vertical space to get entire theaters full of people through efficiently. but… just far too literal for my taste
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