Supported by the Taipei Music Center (TMC) and the Taipei Cultural Center in New York, an exhibition marking the successful completion of TMC, a new musical district within Taipei, is set to open at Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture on April 6. The exhibition explores the relationship of the complex's architecture to the process of its design, current use, Taiwan’s music industry, and the nation’s cosmopolitan ambitions. It introduces the complex’s iconic architecture to an American audience through large-scale photographs, videos, music, and architectural models and drawings.
The TMC was conceived as a "City of Pop Music," a hybrid and multipurpose site dedicated to the performance, curation, production, and celebration of pop music in Asia. The center has three major buildings: The Concert Hall, the Cultural Cube, and the Creative Hub. Since the Concert Hall’s grand opening back in August 2020, the TMC has hosted a variety of high-profile musical and cultural events, including the inaugural concert of Yo-Yo Ma’s Asian tour and the Golden Melody Awards. Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards is inclusive and is been considered the Grammy Awards of popular Mandarin Songs. The TMC project as a whole has gained immense popularity for advertisers and on social media, frequently playing backdrop for car commercials, emerging music groups, and Instagram models—an unanticipated consequence of the TMC’s architecture which will also be highlighted in the exhibition.
In advance of the exhibition opening, a lecture, panel discussion, and musical performance will be held. Lyrical Urbanism is made possible by Dean Nader Tehrani, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, the Cooper Union, the Taipei Cultural Center in New York, the Ministry of Culture, the Taipei Music Center, and Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.
(Photo courtesy of Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture, Yana Zhezhela & Alek Vatagin)