Taipei Performing Arts Center Opens: OMA’s Cube With a Sphere

The Taipei Performing Arts Center opened on 7 August 2022 in the Shilin district of Taipei. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and it is one of the most unusual theatre buildings of recent years. OMA won the competition in 2009 and construction began in 2012. Completion was first planned for 2013, and the building opened nine years late.

The idea

A conventional theatre hides its machinery. Each auditorium has its own stage, backstage and fly tower, and several auditoriums make a large and mostly blank building. OMA proposed to put the stages of all three theatres together in one central block, so that they could share equipment and space, and to attach the auditoriums to its sides.

The centre is a cube of corrugated glass, raised off the ground. Three volumes project from it. The Globe Playhouse is a sphere clad in aluminium, with 800 seats, which looks from the street like a planet lodged in the side of the building. The Grand Theater, with 1,500 seats, is a slanted box on the opposite face. The Blue Box, with 800 seats, is for experimental work.

Because the stages meet in the middle, the Grand Theater and the Blue Box can be opened to each other to make a single hall of 2,300 seats, which the architects call the Super Theater, for productions that would fit in no ordinary house.

The public loop

A second idea concerns people without tickets. A route called the Public Loop runs through the building from the street, by stairs and escalators, past windows that look into the backstage areas, the rehearsal rooms and the auditoriums themselves, and comes out on the roof. It is free and open during the day. The ground beneath the raised cube is a public square.

The setting

The site was chosen deliberately. It faces Jiantan station on the red line of the metro, at the entrance to the Shilin night market, the largest and best known in the city. The architects have said that they wanted the theatre to belong to the life of the street, and in the evening the crowds for the market and the audience for the theatre mix on the same pavement.

For travellers

Jiantan is fifteen minutes from the main station of Taipei. The building is best seen at dusk, when the cube is lit from within and the sphere glows. Take the Public Loop to the roof, see a performance if the programme allows, and eat in the market afterwards. The National Palace Museum is a short bus ride further north.

Taiwan has built three major arts centres in a decade. The others are Weiwuying in Kaohsiung, by Mecanoo, and the National Taichung Theater by Toyo Ito. In Taipei, Capella Taipei opened in 2025, and the city’s restaurants are covered in the Michelin Guide Taiwan.