The Taipei City Government yesterday said that construction on the long-suspended Taipei Dome can resume immediately, after it approved a request by the project’s main contractor, Farglory Group.
In a statement, the Taipei Construction Management Office said that after it on July 16 issued a new building permit, Farglory submitted revised design plans and an application to resume construction, which the office approved on Friday.
Construction had been suspended on the dome, near the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Xinyi District (信義), for more than five years due to disagreements between the city and the company over the safety of some of its features.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
However, Farglory later agreed to rebuild parts of the dome that were not constructed according to plans, reduce the venue’s overall capacity and increase fire safety and evacuation facilities, the office said.
While the office is allowing construction to resume, it also called attention to its ongoing disagreements with the contractor.
It said that Farglory must add safety and fireproofing features to several of the dome’s stairwells to receive a usage permit, citing Article 97 of the Building Technical Regulations (建築技術規則).
In addition, if Farglory wants the facility to be used to host concerts and other large-scale gatherings, it needs to pass a performance-based design review by the Taiwan Architecture and Building Center, the office said.
It added that it had fined Farglory and ordered it to remove cotton sound insulation, which the contractor had installed at the building site without permission.
Although Farglory has filed an appeal, the office has said it was within its rights under the Administrative Appeals Act (行政訴訟法) to issue fines and would continue to do so until the contractor removed the insulation.
The statement also said that Farglory had appointed a new supervising architect, but said the developer must still obtain the city’s authorization to appoint a new design architect.
The Taipei Dome project has been at a standstill since May 20, 2015, when the city ordered Farglory to halt construction over safety concerns, and the discovery of 79 building features that were not constructed according to design specifications.
At the time, Farglory had already completed 80 percent of the work needed to finish the multipurpose stadium.
In the intervening years, there have been multiple lawsuits between the contractor and the city over the resumption of construction.
During that time, the city government has also conducted seven urban design reviews, two environmental impact assessments and two fire safety and evacuation reviews on the site.
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