© soma

Multiple Natures

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City, Country Taichung, Taiwan
Year 2011
Client Taichung City Government
Architect soma architecture
Services Structural Engineering
Facts Height: 330 m | Total weight : 17,000 t | Competition: 2011, 2nd Prize

The Taiwan Tower will become an innovative landmark people will identify within the present and future times. Therefore, the tower should not state a fixed meaning or image but trigger people to invent and create their interpretations of the tower’s meaning. To evoke multiple and diverse ideas, the building must be elusive and complex. The Taiwan Tower is a fibrous structure that emerges out of the interplay of many individual members, forming a synergetic whole. It celebrates diversity and will become a dynamic and contemporary democratic landmark.

The towers structural topology is not defined in a traditional structural design process. In contrast to this, a bottom-up method is established, that leads to a structure with emergent load-bearing capacities. By using probabilistic optimization methods complexity in the topology of structures is achievable, that directly derives from static capacities, but do not explicitly show the underlying load-bearing principles. The inherent load-bearing quality is not readable at first glance and emerges as the result of the complex interaction between the single members.

Design Technologies