China Central Television Headquarters-1

OMA and Arup reimagine the skyscraper as a giant loop rather than a tower.

By Janice Tuchman - This is an excerpt of an article from the July 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

A radical, looping structure, the headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV) stands as an antidote to the typical skyscraper. With its dramatic overhang suspended 36 stories in the air and a diagonally braced, continuous-tube frame expressing the forces of its structural system on its facade, it has become a Beijing landmark even before its completion.

Although the client is a subministry of the Chinese government and accordingly reports the official positions of the Communist Party, it broadcasts mostly a mix of comedies, dramas, and soaps. Yes, it listens to Chairman Hu Jintao; but it also must appeal to an upwardly mobile public. CCTV’s leaders see the new building as one way of grabbing their viewers’ attention.

Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) won a design competition for the project in 2002, working with Arup for a range of engineering services and in alliance with the East China Architectural Design & Research Institute (ECADI), which became the local design institute for both architecture and engineering. At that time in Beijing, there was “a vision that everything here would disappear and be replaced by a forest of skyscrapers to become the city’s new CBD,” says Ole Scheeren, OMA’s partner in charge of the project and head of the firm’s Beijing office. OMA had watched over the years as skyscrapers had devolved from their original role as catalysts of urban development to just commercial tools for maximizing profits. In the process, clients and architects had become increasingly desperate to call attention to their projects. As Scheeren puts it, the “race for height” had become pointless, as one building taller than the last was announced before the preceding one was complete. He noticed a “visual deafness” to such buildings, which look the same from all directions. OMA wanted to reengage city space in a way that would “proclaim” the building’s inner workings. It proposed a loop of interconnected activities where the “linear principle of hierarchy is dissolved in a circuit of equal parts without beginning or end, without top or bottom,” explains Scheeren.

As designed, the CCTV headquarters combines offices, space for news gathering and program development, studios for production, and facilities for broadcasting—in a continuous loop that runs through the project. The idea is to break down organizational silos and spark creativity and collaboration. The project includes a landscaped media park adjacent to the tower and a second building, called the Television Cultural Center (TVCC), which has public facilities, such as a hotel, a theater, restaurants, a ballroom, and conference rooms. A third building—circular in plan and just a few stories high—houses mechanical, electrical, and energy services for both high-rises.

Rising 768 feet, the 5.1-million-square-foot main CCTV building comprises a pair of towers sloping 6 degrees on both X and Y axes, a 9-story base connecting the two towers, and a 13-story “overhang” that connects them starting at the 36th floor. Scheeren calls the overhang an “urban plateau” that lifts space off the ground but also makes it accessible to the public. The base and towers will define a public plaza that will sit above four levels below grade. Although most of the building will be reserved for CCTV employees, the public will have access to a circuit offering glimpses of the company’s activities—from broadcasting and production to welcoming actors and celebrities. This public loop will include an observation area in the overhang with views across Beijing and even straight down onto the plaza through three circular “windows” in the floor.

Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop

Junya Ishigami distills architecture to its bare minimum at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop.

By Naomi R. Pollock

Occasionally a building emerges that seems to transcend architecture’s inherent limitations. Tokyo designer Junya Ishigami’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT) Workshop is one of those buildings. Articulated with minimal means—exterior walls of thin glass and interior clusters of slender white columns—Ishigami’s ethereal structure is barely a building at all. While the transparent enclosure exposes everything inside, the delicate steel columns define scattered oases of open space, each one a different functional component. Awash in soft daylight admitted by glass bands overhead as well as the building’s transparent envelope, Ishigami’s meandering interior landscape creates the ambience of a tree-filled forest, not a college classroom.

A stellar debut, KAIT Workshop is the 34-year-old architect’s first realized building after launching his practice in 2004 following a four-year stint working for Kazuyo Sejima. More recently, he authored Japan’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale (page 77). Like the pavilion, the 21,410-square-foot workshop is modest in scale. Yet this single-story glass box is the centerpiece of the school’s 32-acre campus, whose 40-year-old buildings are currently being replaced one by one. When this ambitious makeover is complete, the workshop will be visible from KAIT’s main gate, where its 5,000 budding engineers and scientists pass each day. Located in Atsugi, an exurb 20 miles west of Tokyo, KAIT, like most Japanese universities, is a commuter school. Though Ishigami’s parallelogram-shaped building gently challenges the rectilinear grid of pathways uniting the campus, it fits comfortably within the existing walkways encircling its site. The building has openings on all four sides, but its main entrance, indicated by an indented doorway and thin steel canopy, is closest to the campus gate.

Open to all KAIT students, the workshop accommodates nonacademic, creative pursuits ranging from molding silver pendants to assembling solar-powered cars. Daylight floods the building during school hours, while ceiling fixtures and task lamps enable the factory-like facility to operate long after classes end for the day. The one-room building contains 14 freely arranged, open spaces. These include a check-in area, denoted by an Ishigami-designed, donut-shaped counter, as well as specialized areas for pottery, woodworking, computer graphics, metal casting, and other media. There are also four multipurpose work spaces, a small supply shop, and an officelike alcove for the facility supervisors. Ishigami eschewed organizational devices, such as structural grids, proscribed circulation paths, and even walls (the closest lavatories are next door). Instead, he used rectangular columns, furniture of brown wood or white steel, freestanding HVAC units, and potted plants to modulate the whole 16-foot-high space.

“I wanted to create a building where it isn’t clear if there are any rules at all,” explains Ishigami. Yet it took a lot of work to reach this objective. In response to the client’s request for many small spaces instead of one big studio, the architect started with a 13-foot grid of rectilinear columns but quickly found this framework too limiting. So he made incremental modifications to the pillars’ positions, dimensions, and orientations. This enabled him to focus on qualitative criteria—such as the size and distribution of open areas and their relationship to one another—and to sculpt the space as if it were clay.

A labor-intensive process that went on for three years, Ishigami’s rigorous design phase required endless iterations involving 1,000 study models of various scales and drawings—both CAD-generated and, especially, hand-drawn—that enabled the fine-tuning of multiple variables at once. The completed building’s 305 columns appear randomly distributed and arbitrarily shaped—290 variations of a quadrilateral—but were, in fact, very deliberately designed.

“Due to the complexity of the columns, it was important to keep the structural system as simple as possible,” says structural engineer Yasutaka Konishi, a contemporary of Ishigami’s who worked on SANAA projects during his five-year tenure at Sasaki Structural Consultants. It consists of three main steel components: a conventional two-way roof frame, 42 compression columns for vertical loads, and 263 post-tensioned columns that carry horizontal loads like mini sheer walls. Though both types of columns are anchored with simple concrete footings, the compression and tension members connect to the roof frame with welded and pin joints, respectively. Because many of the supports do not align with the roof’s 5-by-3-foot girder grid, Konishi inserted extra beams to bridge the gaps.

Despite their separate roles, the tension and compression members look the same to the naked eye. “I was striving for ambiguity even among the columns,” explains Ishigami. But due to their oblong shapes, individual columns may appear different depending on the visitor’s viewpoint—an illusion that compounds the intricacy of Ishigami’s composition. Coated with white paint, each column is actually a slice of steel plate. Cut in various widths from slabs of three different thicknesses, each was tailored to the architect’s exacting specifications. This unusual fabrication technique accommodated every permutation from the thinnest tension member, measuring 0.63-by-6 inches (16-by-145 mm), to the thickest compression member, measuring 3-by-4 inches (63-by-90 mm).

Construction was equally unorthodox. After workers put compression members and the roof frame in place, they suspended tension members from the girders but did not attach them at the bottom until after weighting the roof to simulate the snow load. “No one had ever built like this before,” says Konishi. “I thought the building might sink or fall over.” But when the weights were removed, the taut steel planes snapped into place and the roof popped up as expected. Made of steel deck with wire-reinforced-glass inserts, the roof tilts slightly to drain rainwater, and weighs as little as possible to handle earthquake forces. The designers put the exterior glass skin on a similar kind of materials diet. It’s a mere 0.39 inches (10 mm) thick, but does require beefy glass ribs for vertical stability.

To blur the boundary between indoors and out, Ishigami eliminated all openings on the glass walls except for doors and a few small floor vents that draw fresh air supplied by roof vents. Like traditional Japanese borrowed scenery, the surrounding landscape serves as the backdrop for the interior. Inside, the columns function as abstract trees and potted greenery—each plant carefully selected by the architect—serves a bona-fide design role, not just a decorative one. By blending architecture and nature in a remarkably fresh and dynamic way, KAIT Workshop plants Ishigami solidly among those Japanese designers striving to reduce buildings to their bare minimum.

Aqua

Studio Gang sets new heights for the Chicago skyscraper.

By Suzanne Stephens

Chicago’s skyscrapers may be famous for their technical achievements and functional expression, but they are often short on pizzazz. Now, Studio Gang has designed Aqua—a Niemeyeresque apartment and hotel tower whose architectonic facade of sensuously swerving, white concrete balconies jumps out from among its stolid brethren. Enabled by client Jim Loewenberg of the Magellan Development Group, Jeanne Gang, principal of Studio Gang, conceived the 82-story tower on a podium as part Loewenberg’s Lakeshore East, a 28-acre mixed-used development on the former Illinois Central Railroad yards edging Lake Michigan.

In addition to the water views on the east, this soigné antidote to Chicago’s straitlaced Modernism looks south to Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago and north to the Chicago River, with the Hancock Center in the distance. Along the river, Aqua’s curvilinear architectural precursor—the cylindrical twin towers of Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City (1964)—can be glimpsed from many balconies. While Goldberg’s scheme integrates the plan with the envelope, wedge-shaped rooms came with the price of admission. Since not all prospective occupants enjoy fitting furniture into irregularly shaped spaces, Gang’s decision to wrap a rippling carapace around a rectilinear poured-in-place concrete frame at Aqua makes sense in terms of construction and marketing. For her part, Gang contends that the building’s orthogonal core reflects Chicago’s grid.

Naturally, the question arises about how a female architect with a 37-person firm, known for smaller-scale community centers and houses, got to design a 1.9- million-square-foot tower, which cost $300 million in construction. Loewenberg, an MIT-trained architect as well as developer, met Gang at a dinner in Chicago following a lecture by Frank Gehry. Since Loewenberg had already enlisted the usual ranking Chicago architects to design portions of his development, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as master planners, he claims he was ready for a “young architect who had not done a high-rise before.” Gang, trained at the University of Illinois, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, offered the proper pragmatic sensibility. Loewenberg wasn’t worried about Gang’s high-rise experience: He would be the executive architect as well as the client.

The 180,000-square-foot site on the western edge of Lakeshore East generated a tower-on-a-podium solution that would negotiate the 50-foot drop in grade between Upper Columbus Drive on the west and Harbor Park at the center of the complex on the east. The podium itself contains lobbies for both the hotel (a hotelier is to be designated this month) and the apartments, along with retail stores, a ballroom, an indoor pool, and other public spaces. Beneath all that is a parking garage. Above, the tower is divided into the hotel, on floors 4 to 18; 474 rental apartments, on floors 19 to 52; and 264 condos on the floors above. Atop the tower are penthouses, on the 80th and 81st floors, where ceilings go as high as 14 feet.

In designing the balconies that extend outward from 2 to 12 feet, Gang thought of them as a concrete topography that would remind Chicagoans of limestone outcroppings along the Great Lakes—only in this case, the rises and falls would extend vertically from the top to the bottom of the shaft. Here, too, the ledges—9-inch-thick concrete balconies—thin out toward the edge of the cantilever to help drainage. In working out the balcony contours, Gang conducted view studies of unimpeded sight lines for places of interest. The different ripples also allow oblique views up and down the facade from the various balconies. Moving between physical models and digital ones—switching from hand to computer—Gang’s team arrived at separate calculations for each floor plate.

Magellan found a way to be efficient about creating curves for the concrete balconies: An edge-form steel plate guided the pour and, when finished, snapped back into a straight plane to be reused and bent into another curve. While this method saved on construction, the team did not include thermal breaks between the outdoor and indoor slabs, owing to the complexity of the cantilevers. The absence has received criticism for the loss of heat during the winter due to the radiator effect. (For more on this debate, see GreenSource, Letters, March–April 2010, page 14, and Editors’ Letter, page 13). In response, Gang says that while thermal breaks would have been preferred, other considerations have saved energy, such as using Chicago’s District Energy System, along with the apartments’ natural ventilation, sun shading during the summer, and the use of high-performance glass to cut solar loads.

The architects wanted to make sure apartments could receive sufficient direct light and so created “ponds” of glass that interrupt the balconies in certain portions of the facade. To reduce the solar loads, they specified six types of glazing, including tinted, reflective, and fritted, along with low-E glass. The fritted glass also doubles as a safety factor in keeping birds from crashing into the tower—a strategy that won Aqua an award from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

One of the most compelling features—besides the balconies—is the landscaped roof, 80,000 square feet in size, atop the 3-story podium. Working with Wolff Landscape Architecture, Studio Gang created a swirling garden with paths reminiscent of Roberto Burle-Marxe and planted with colorful flora in light soil. A sustainable by-product of the garden is the mitigation of the summer heat-island effect so typical of asphalt roofs. In addition, it provides occupants with other amenities—such as a running track, outdoor pool, and outdoor fireplace.

Although the rectangular podium itself is stark and blocky in comparison with the garden and tower, Gang softened the effect with two large concrete staircases that link the upper street level with the lower Harbor Park: One is a switchback stair, the other a spiral. On the east face of the podium, Gang inserted nine town houses, for which she designed interior finishes. She also executed finishes as well as furnishings for a model town house nearing completion.

Rectilinear floor plans and a squared podium are pro forma. What advances architecture at Aqua is the inventiveness of its swerving tiers of concrete, which not only heighten the tower’s livability for the occupants, but add to the appearance of the cityscape for Chicagoans. Yet the optical play is not without drawbacks: The visual appeal of Aqua’s curves works best close-up or at mid-distance, and on a bright, sunny day when the gleaming glass adds luster to the sinuous balconies. However, from a distance, and on a gray day, the curves flatten into straight lines, the white concrete darkens, and the ponds of glass turn into irregular swaths of patchwork. As an optical experiment—as a machine for viewing (looking at the city from the tower, and at the tower from the city)—Aqua is enchanting, but needs further research.

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

Diller Scofidio + Renfro and FXFOWLE give a bravura performance with the expansion and renovation of New York’s Alice Tully Hall.

By Suzanne Stephens

Pietro Belluschi would probably roll over in his grave if he could see Alice Tully Hall today. But not necessarily with good cause. In 1969, Belluschi (along with Eduardo Catalano and Helge Westermann) designed the Juilliard School building, which encompasses Alice Tully Hall, in a somewhat muscular, but still watered-down rendition of the poured-concrete Brutalism made popular by Le Corbusier’s late, rugged Modern architecture [record, January 1970, page 121]. Belluschi softened the Juilliard building with a travertine coating that matched the rest of Lincoln Center. At the time, it still appeared more macho than the tepidly Modern Classical buildings of the 16-acre complex. (See Martin Filler’s critique of Lincoln Center.)

Since 2003, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DSR) has been in charge of reconfiguring and generally spiffing up the public spaces of the Lincoln Center campus (working with Beyer Blinder Belle on one portion). Now, Juilliard is being renovated and expanded by DSR with FXFOWLE, and its first phase, Alice Tully Hall, which opened in February, demonstrates the teams’ stunning, but let’s say unusual, $157 million effort. The architects brought their own neo-Modernist vocabulary and gravity-defying vision to the job, enabled by sophisticated engineers (Arup), not to mention three-dimensional computer modeling and advanced materials fabrication.

The project, which increases the hall from 125,000 to 150,000 square feet, involved a radical amputation, extension, and renovation within Belluschi’s 500,000-square-foot structure. DSR and FXFOWLE removed his original monumental stair on Broadway and the second-level balcony and bridge over 65th Street (a lighter one is planned) linking to Lincoln Center’s main plaza, and stripped off the south- and east-end walls.

In adding the extra square feet, the team expanded horizontally, owing to an 85-foot-high cap for Lincoln Center buildings. But instead of staying with the orthogonally determined volume of the original, they made the extension a trapezoid in plan to align with Broadway on the east, where it slices on a diagonal through the New York City grid. In an operation that could be described as surgically Frankensteinian as well as structurally mind-boggling, the team placed the new school spaces in a cantilevered wedge that forms a prowlike canopy, zooming out to Broadway and West 65th Street above the new 38-foot-6-inch-high glazed lobby, and designed so that the prow’s underside tilts up at a 16-degree angle. (A small outdoor “grandstand” at the southeast corner echoes the tilt.) Structural glazed walls bring daylight into three stories of rehearsal space and classrooms in the wedge, as well as a dance studio suspended beneath its soffit. As Liz Diller, principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, puts it, “We were trying to work with the DNA of what was there, yet subvert the language to a new idiom.” While either genetic or linguistic metaphors seem apt to describe the process, the end result hardly seems an organic or syntactic extrapolation of the code governing the original design.

Putting in place the elements to graft the wedge onto the orthogonal structure did require unconventional moves: The team installed trusses running east–west between the third and sixth levels to carry the load for the four floors of the expansion, the longest of which has a 75-foot back span with a 50-foot cantilever. Some of the trusses’ diagonals needed to be offset to accommodate doors, passageways, and other obstructions. And to account for lateral loads, steel diagonal brace frames (of which only one is visible) extend from the ground to the roof.

The original lobby for Alice Tully Hall was depressed below grade, with the entrance underneath the monumental stair, while the school’s entrance occurred on West 65th Street at the bridge. Now the architects have brought light and space to the lobby by sheathing Tully’s east and south elevations with a mullionless glass, one-way-cable wall system. The Juilliard School’s new entrance, also at street level, opens onto a dramatically steep, stadiumlike stair leading to the second level. Sylvia Smith, FAIA, partner of FXFOWLE, notes the “incremental renovation,” which is still going on, has allowed musicians to practice while construction crews hammered.

In almost doubling Tully’s lobby from 5,157 to 9,468 square feet, including a 3,600-square-foot patron’s salon on the mezzanine, DSR and FXFOWLE included a visible public café in the lobby along Broadway, backed by blood-red walls of Amazonian muirapiranga wood. Portuguese ataija azul limestone floors extend through the auditorium lobby proper, where narrow passageways take visitors to the side entrances of the concert hall. Here the architects simply lined the walls in dark gray felt and covered the floor with gray industrial carpeting. This “sensory deprivation space,” as Diller describes it, is meant to heighten the drama of coming into the auditorium with its sinuous walls of a warm African moabi. This transition space turns out to be one of the few missteps: Its darkness makes it hard for visitors to navigate, and its black-hole effect cuts off the sense of procession established by the gleaming lobby.

The auditorium, now named the Starr Theater, on the other hand, is smashing. The team was required to keep the size of the original, while increasing the number of seats from 923 to 1,087. Although the earlier stage could be expanded and the first three rows of seats removed for performance flexibility, now the stage provides three configurations, with front rows sliding down and underneath it when desired.

The coup de théatre, however, is the sinuously curved moabi paneling covering the walls and parts of the ceiling of the auditorium. Some of the wood panels are opaque, with a moabi veneer over reconstituted wood. But the most noticeable panels at the back of the stage and on the side walls are translucent, bonded to resin with LED lighting embedded in them to emit a warm, rosy glow. The only problem is, now that opening festivities are over, visitors may find that this panel lighting is used in a limited way. Not all who control the switch seem to have fully bought into the concept.

The acoustics for the original hall, sheathed in wood batten with dampening behind it, had satisfied audiences, although not without complaints. Since the expansion brought the building even closer to a subway line, the acoustical consultants, JaffeHolden, called for isolating the floor and the seating slab with rubber, and worked with the architects to calculate the curves of the 1-to-11⁄2-inch-thick moabi panels for reflectivity. Adjustable acoustic banners over side walls, plus rotating wood stage panels and movable ceiling panels, provide absorptive surfaces for amplified music. The entire effort, urbanistically, aesthetically, and acoustically, has met with deserved success. The architects proved they could carry off this bold operation with bravery, skill, and panache.

National Stadium of Sports Affairs Council

Toyo Ito raises the bar for sports facilities with his graceful, sustainable design for the National Stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

In a fitting match of design and program, Toyo Ito performed a feat of architectural athleticism with his National Stadium of the Sports Affairs Council in Taiwan. Combining the grace of a ballet dancer with the strength of a body builder, its lithe, sinewy form encircles a playing field, while its brawny concrete and steel components do the heavy lifting. Located in Kaohsiung, a city of 1.5 million people 234 miles south of Taipei, the 40,000-seat arena (Ito’s first work in Taiwan) opened in time for the 2009 World Games, which took place from July 16 through 26.

Having teamed up with the Japanese design and construction company Takenaka Corporation plus architects Ricky Liu & Associates and Fu Tsu Construction Company, both of Taiwan, Ito won an international competition held in 2005. The objective of the clients, Taiwan’s National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the Kaohsiung Bureau of Public Works, was to erect a stadium with a 1,300-foot-long track and a soccer field that met the specifications of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Association of Athletics Federation while complying with local government guidelines for integrating green building technology.

In addition to satisfying these criteria, Ito’s goal was to revamp the typology’s closed, concentric parti by opening the arena to the landscape and loosening up its form. “Usually stadiums are very static and symmetrical, but this time we wanted to make a more fluid and dynamic shape,” explains Ito.

Located on the grounds of a former navy base north of downtown Kaohsiung, the stadium begins with a long “tail” that greets sports fans, who mostly approach from the subway station nearby. Containing ticket booths and concessions shops, this appendage starts out small in section but expands steadily as it ascends the ground’s gentle slope. When the land levels off, the tail merges with the arena’s top-heavy body: a soaring, C-shaped grandstand that whips around the field and terminates abruptly at the “head.”

Holding upper and lower seating areas (plus room for an additional 15,000 temporary chairs), the arena opens to an internal lawn on the south, and the main gate connects to a broad terrace fanning out in front. “You can stand outside and still sense what is happening on the field,” says Chih Hsun Su, deputy chief engineer in the Construction Office of the city’s Public Works Bureau. The stands’ energetic form is secured in place by a concrete base containing two partially underground levels, both below grade at the building perimeter but open to the sunken playing field in the middle. The upper basement contains parking, administrative offices, and VIP suites that open onto box seats; the lower basement has prep areas for the athletes and more parking.

As in many Ito-designed buildings, the stadium’s architecture and structure are essentially one. Since the arena has little need for full enclosure, a series of massive structural elements, each one clearly articulated and connected to the next, defines the building. The sequence begins with the piles and raft foundations. These support the basements’ reinforced-concrete slabs and walls, which provide lateral stability as well as vertical load distribution. Most of the downward force comes from the concrete saddles above. Interspersed with openings and aligned like vertebrae, these monumental arches create the stadium’s double-decker circulation spine. Their irregular forms—nine different types in the body of the building alone—were made of poured-in-place concrete, as were the shoulder-angled beams supporting the upper seat decks and the roof.

Bolted to the saddles and the beams are 159 cantilevered steel trusses. Arranged radially, they extend out over the seats and hold up the roof. Tying the trusses together, 32 oscillating spirals of steel pipe stand out as the exterior’s most distinctive feature. Composed from hollow pieces measuring 13 inches in diameter and 20 feet in length, the tubes were factory made to Ito’s 3D specifications. Once welded together on-site, the pipes take on an entirely new character. Crossing over and under the trusses, they imbue the entire stadium with a sense of movement.

In addition to their strong visual impact, the coiled steel members act as lateral bracing that holds the framework for the 229,314-square-foot roof. This intricate, scalelike surface shades the spectators with its 6,482 aluminum-framed glazed units. It is also a massive solar collector, as 4,482 of these sections contain pairs of 4-foot-square solar panels. Tempered glass plate of variable length mediates the energy-gathering units’ rigid flat shape and the stadium’s irregular, curved geometry.

“Connecting these 2D and 3D elements was extremely difficult,” says L.P. Lin of Fu Tsu Construction. In locations unsuitable for solar-energy collection, the glazing is made entirely of tempered glass. Rubber gaskets smooth out the roof’s plane, while narrow troughs (or gutters) gather rainwater and direct it to underground cisterns supplying the soccer field’s irrigation system.

The largest solar-energy-generating stadium in the world, the building produces 1.1 million kilowatt hours annually—many times more energy than it needs. As a result, the system funnels the excess directly to the Taiwan Power Company, eliminating the need for costly and space-consuming storage batteries. When the stadium hosts a major event, it simply buys back extra electricity for lights, air-conditioning, and twin JumboTron screens. Furthermore, according to Fu Tsu Construction, the solar panels are responsible for reducing the building’s CO2 emissions by as much as 660 tons annually.

Another beneficiary of the sun is the grass field. To ensure that the lawn gets its required daily exposure of 5½ hours, the stadium’s long axis tilts 15 degrees north-northwest. This orientation also keeps most of the bright rays out of the athletes’ eyes—an important consideration that could impact the outcome of the game. Of equal concern was the ability to control the wind. Because the stadium opens to the south, it is able to corral the strong gusts that buffet the site during Kaohsiung’s scorching summers. While the resulting natural ventilation maintains comfortable temperatures for spectators, breezes are likely to disturb play. To prevent such mishaps as the ball blowing around during a game, the architects embedded the field into the earth.

Visually, the verdant plain relates to the grass-covered slope inside the stadium as well as the grounds outside—a mixture of existing and newly planted trees. “We wanted to attract the public with a new urban park typology,” explains Ito.

Nevertheless, while landscaping mollifies its impact, the voluminous building hardly blends with the residential neighborhood around it. Yet no one seems to mind. On the contrary, Ito’s landmark has invigorated the area and is a big score for Kaohsiung.