I was working with some of my co-workers on an architecture competition for a pop music center in Taipei, Taiwan.  Unfortunately, there were only six of us on the team, and we were working on the competition in our free time, which we soon discovered wasn’t nearly enough to develop a solid, coherent scheme for a $100M project.  We didn’t have enough time or manpower to meet the deadline with a concept that we would be proud to submit.

Here are some sketches that I drew for the initial concept:

This is a plan for the site, which is over 700 meters long, from left to right.  My scheme is basically a series of pathways snaking through the site, passing between and around the larger site features.  These undulating paths are at different elevations from one another, and the width of each path varies as it traverses the site.  The paths are made of different materials, such as sand, gravel, and crushed granite – all pervious materials to help with site drainage and stormwater runoff.

Inside the circle at the top of this drawing is the main performance hall, which would be designed to hold up to 6,000 people.  Other than identifying where it would be sited in this scheme, I did not develop the main hall further.

This portion of the site is separated from the linear portion of the site (to the south) by a fairly large street.  I envisioned this part of the site as a linear park, with a lake in the center and an outdoor amphitheater at each end.  There is an additional outdoor amphitheater just east of the lake, which isn’t marked in this drawing.  I also planned four large gathering areas to give buskers and street performers a place to entertain people in the park.

This sketch shows a section through the plan above.  This section shows how the paths are at different elevations, and it is meant to be more diagrammatic than realistic.  Some of the elements in this sketch are in the background, such as two of the outdoor amphitheaters, while some of the elements have been cloven, such as the lake and the outdoor amphitheater just east of the lake.

These sketches are rather large, measuring about 12″ tall and 36″ long.  They were done very quickly, during my lunch break one day.  Therefore, they are rough, and I don’t have anything more polished to represent my ideas.  As a team, we chose not to pursue this scheme, so I did not investigate this concept further.