Weiwuying Opens in Kaohsiung, the Largest Arts Centre Under One Roof

The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts opened on 13 October 2018. It is known by the name of its site, Weiwuying, a former army camp in the Fengshan district of Kaohsiung, the port city in the south of Taiwan. It is described as the largest performing arts centre in the world under a single roof.

The roof

The building was designed by Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo, who won the competition in 2007. The old camp had become a park, and its best feature was a stand of banyan trees, whose crowns join overhead and whose trunks and hanging roots leave shaded space beneath. Houben took the grove as her model.

The result is one great canopy, 35,000 square metres in area, that rises and dips over four separate halls. Between the halls the ground level is left open on all sides. This is Banyan Plaza, a covered public square through which the sea breeze passes, where people walk, practise tai chi and listen to free concerts in a climate that is hot for most of the year. On one side the roof slopes down to the ground to form the seating of an outdoor theatre, facing the park, with room for 30,000.

Kaohsiung is a shipbuilding city, and the skin of the plaza was made by a local shipyard. Its curved surfaces are formed from 2,320 steel plates, welded and painted white like the hull of a ship. The roof above is covered in 4,500 aluminium panels.

The halls

The Opera House has 2,236 seats and is arranged in the traditional horseshoe, with interiors in red and purple. The Concert Hall, of 1,981 seats, is in the vineyard form, with the audience on terraces around the stage. It has the largest pipe organ in Asia, with 9,085 pipes, built in Germany, in an asymmetrical case meant to suggest bamboo. The Playhouse has 1,209 seats and a stage that can be changed from a proscenium to a thrust. The Recital Hall, for chamber music, has 434.

For travellers

Kaohsiung is an hour and a half from Taipei by high-speed rail. Weiwuying has its own station on the orange line of the city’s metro. The plaza and the park are open at all hours, and guided tours of the halls are given daily. The programme includes visiting orchestras and opera companies as well as Taiwanese opera and puppet theatre, and the organ is played in short lunchtime recitals.

The city has rebuilt its harbour front in the same period, with a pop music centre and a ferry terminal, linked by a light rail line. The InterContinental Kaohsiung is close to the new waterfront. From Kaohsiung it is a short journey north to Chiayi and the Alishan Forest Railway, and the island’s hot springs are described in our guide to bathing in Taiwan.