The High Stand

The High Stand is a community center for six villages, providing a space for disseminating information and a public space for community activities. The project aims to serve different groups of people categorized by distance and encourage social contact, and the program is therefore arranged accordingly.

The site locates in the West Central District of Tainan City. Before declining in the 90s, this area was the city’s center, always crowded with theaters, clothing stores, and restaurants. However, the area surrounding the site has been redeveloped recently. Tourists have flooded the neighborhood again since the completion of MVRDV’s Tainan Spring, while HaiAn Road has become a new nightlife district.

The primary purpose of the design is to compensate the local residents, the victims of urban development. Regarding rezoning and urban development, gentrification is always the primary objective. The adjacent Hai-An Rd. is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Hai-An Rd has attracted much more tourists after it expanded, while it used to be a much narrower road with vendors and residents reaching out to the road. Nevertheless, the interest of the residents needs to be addressed as well. Therefore, The newly constructed community center will prioritize serving the neighborhood.

Ground Floor

The ground floor aims to serve the group with the least distance, the local neighborhood. It is a hybrid of a wet market and a food court. The preconstructed is arranged in an array manner, while two open courts are placed in front of the two temples adjacent to the site providing a temple court that didn't exist originally. A cone-shaped core and two sets of escalators exaggerated the vertical circulation, which led to upper levels.

Upper Levels

The upper mass is an information center that serves the second closest group of people, the residents of the six surrounding villages. It contains a lecture hall, a library, and a gallery space. The void in the middle connects the people from the upper levels to the ground floors visually and leads sunlight into the reading area.

Roof Top Deck

The roof is an observation deck overlooking the entire Tainan City, which seeks to serve all the people beyond the community. Since the site is only meters away from the Tainan Spring, a popular attraction, the observation deck is also a sky garden for tourists to enjoy.

Spaces shape the actions and behaviors of every individual and in every perspective of scale.

People tend to believe that they make their own decisions. Yet, most of the time, our choices are determined by outside factors rather than ourselves. The urban context and traffic affect our daily commuting routes so severely that we only contribute a margin of our decisions. Nonetheless, we never notice that spaces play an enormous role in our day-to-day lives as the idiom routine numbs our senses as we repeatedly go through the same daily paths. My design is a reminder that reality is a result shaped by every slightest event and encourages people to recall the event that shapes their present life.

The site sits on the city's edge, adjacent to the NanShan public cemetery, and is connected by the Zhuxi river. The commuting traffic is the idiom routine. From the view of the city side, the site sits at the end of the road and splits traffic flow into two, interpreted as the event that forms our present life.

The lobby is a simple rectangular space, and the circulation is a straight line penetrating the hall where the vertical circulation sits at the end. Despite the unambiguous indication, the light wells on the roof create an arrayed square to suggest other ways to experience the space.

as the participants leave the theatre, the route guides them to the top of the building. Two juxtaposed walls sitting at the extension of the Nan-men Road axis direct them to go through the light well that created the arrayed light in the lobby, where they will be able to observe how the space affects actions and activities. Thus, encourage the participants to recall how their actions were shaped when they entered the building.

Miscellaneous Works