Taipei City Government said yesterday it would invite world-renowned architects to join a competition to design a world-class theater near Shilin Night Market that would serve as a venue for large and long-running performances.
The 2.2-hectare Taipei Performing Arts Center will be built on Chengde Road across the Jiantan MRT Station. It will house a 1,500-seat theater and two smaller 800-seat theaters, Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs said.
Hoping to make the center a distinctive cultural landmark on a scale similar to the National Theater and the National Concert Hall, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said the city would allocate NT$4.3 billion (US$140 million) for the project and begin an international design competition to find the best design by next year.
About 15 percent of the budget will be awarded to the winning team, chosen by a committee headed by Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the department said.
“We are confident the project will attract the interest of several of the world’s top 10 architect,” Hau said during a press conference at Taipei City Hall yesterday.
“We want the best team, and the city government will give the architects all the creative freedom to complete their work,” Hau said.
Department commissioner Lee Yong-ping (李永萍) said the lack of large performing centers have been a major challenge for the country’s performing arts groups as they struggle to find a venue that can accommodate regular performances that run for more than two weeks.
Lee said the Taipei Performing Arts Center, which is scheduled to start construction in 2010 and open to the public by 2013, will allow performing groups to hold regular shows that run from three to six months.
“We expect the center to help with the development of local performing groups and build up Taipei’s image as a cultural city,” she said.
The city government will also invite international architectural teams to design two other cultural facilities — the Taipei Pop Music Center and Taipei City Museum, Lee said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater