Taiwan Tower

MULTIMODAL ICON - MANYFOLD TOWER
The Taiwan Tower will become an innovative landmark people will identify with in present as well as in future times. Therefore the tower should not state a fixed meaning or image, but trigger people to invent and create their own interpretations of the tower’s meaning.
To evoke multiply and diverse images the tower has to be illusive and complex. Taiwan Tower is a fibrous structure that emerges out of the interplay of many individual members, forming a synergetic whole. The Taiwan Tower celebrates diversity and will become a dynamic and contemporary landmark.

FIBROUS TOWER - NEW TOWER TYPOLOGY
The design establishes a new tower typology - a fibrous bundle consisting of many individual members that merge into one complex whole.
The structure is dissolved at the bottom, thereby allowing the park landscape to flow freely between the individual members. They create a non-hierarchical open field that is interpreted as a cell pattern. The individual cells produce the base pattern for the building volumes, squares and green areas and networks of paths.

TOWER OF INNOVATION - ZERO CARBON COMPLEX
Taiwan Tower will become a sustainable icon displaying cutting edge technologies and innovations. The “zero carbon” tower will be the world’s largest vertical absorber that functions as a self-sufficient system. Combined with the museum it will be a visionary ecological building ensemble. Furthermore the tower turns invisible energy processes into a spatial experience and becomes an architectural statement: the need of reduction of energy consumption leads to architectural and spatial innovation.

MOVING TOWER - A MULTI-LAYERED EXPERIENCE
The tower offers diversified spatial experiences – from an open, dissolved structure in the Park, to the intermediate platforms with their kinetic devices that give an outlook onto future architecture, to the sky zone offering spectacular views over Taichung and the surrounding nature. The theme of energy is staged through diverse kind of experiences from kinetic to kinaesthetic: Visitors are moving up the tower in panoramic capsules enjoying the changing views over the city. At the intermediate platforms they experience how frontier technologies could influence our future.

LEARNING FROM NATURE - EVOLUTION OF THE TOWER GEOMETRY
The potential of natural processes is used to create an evocative and multilayered tower appearance. Algorithms underlying natural processes are applied in digital models to organize multiple members into one performative fibrous structure.
The design is evolved in a bottom up approach, using swarm intelligence systems. The geometry of the tower emerges as one possible scenario from a solution space created by interactions among and between individual agents. The results were overlaid with functional requirements and further developed with the help of evolutionary structural software.