Soma architecture - multiple natures

Multiple Natures / soma - Soma architecture - multiple natures - Skyscrapers Soma 

Taiwan Tower Complex, Taichung, 2011   international open competition, 2nd award

NEW PROJECTS: Projects Skyscrapers Soma 

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Architects soma, Vienna
Location : Taichung, TaiwanProject Name : Multiple Natures – Fibrous TowerUse : Observation Tower, Taichung City Museum, parkSite Area : 44.000㎡Bldg. Area: 10.000㎡

Austrian architecture firm SOMA has this radical design for the skyline of a city in Taiwan: the "Multiple Natures" fibrous tower, a 1,080-foot spire that twists up into bulbous pods from a base of eight support stalks. Believe it or not, the concept isn't as far-fetched as it looks up front, either.
the bundled tubes served as a great advantage: availability, ease of construction and beneficial air drag – very similar to the growth of muscles or tree fibers. The specialized system of construction, necesitated by the initial design strategy, helped develop a high performance, high efficiency design that takes a lesson from natural processes and pushes them to work to the design’s advantage.

Placing second, behind Sou Fujimoto Architects’ winning proposal, the Austrian practice soma proposed a new tower typology, titled Fibrous Tower of Multiple Natures, for theTaiwan Tower International Competition in Taichung, Taiwan. The conceptual drive for this tower comes from the desire to create a cultural landmark whose associations are multiple and dynamic, adapting with changing ideas about the nature of a skyscraper in an urban environment. Soma writes, “the tower should not state a fixed message, but trigger people to invent their own interpretations of the tower’s meaning”. How does soma accomplish this? Read on to find out.

It may look like a stiff breeze could blow this thing over — or that it was built by an occupying force of tripod-loving aliens from The War of the Worlds — but the "fibrous tower," as SOMA calls it, features four more conventional support pillars toward its core, with the four fatter outside pillars still providing support but primarily contributing to the tower's façade.

The ground floor of the building is composed of the Taichung City Museum and the tower lobby.  Upper exhibition spaces form the three dimensional ceiling of the lobby, collapsing the experience of these two distinct programs.  The museum has three distinct spaces: back rooms for multimedia installations, zones for introductive exhibitions and daylight areas for integrated galleries with the exhibition halls.  This last space also functions as a lounge with views of the tower and park.  The tower is also accessible through the museum allowing for greater flexibility of circulation throughout the tower.

The Fibrous Tower rises as a vertical typology, but dissolves as it reaches it base where legs come touch down and form a landscape where people can move freely between them. The structure and canopy below have a cellular, “non-hierarchical” structure that produce building volumes, open areas and green space between path networks. The four inner legs have individual functions associated with circulation and access to the tower that rises above: panoramic elevators, fire elevators and emergency stairs. The outer legs expand outward, creating platforms and observatories for public use. From these observation decks, visitors can see the detailed structure of these legs, which at this distance are interpreted as tubes, woven and subdividing into different functions. From a distance, these tubes appear to be of one structure.

The tower is designed as a zero-carbon building.  Designed to function as a self-sufficient system, it supples 100% of its own energy from renewable onsite energy generation.  Photovoltaic cells are integrated into the roof areas of the museum and exhibition spaces.  Highly efficient crystalline modules are applied to opaque roof areas and semi-transparent cell types are used where daylight is used to light the spaces below.  PV modules here are used for both energy production and shading.  A flexible PV system will also be applied to the tower’s skin, transforming the entire building into an solar absorber.  Soma also points out that diffuse solar radiation is at 60% in Taiwan, making it just as efficient to place PV cells outside the range of horizontal or south-facing orientations.  Soma estimates that the total area for solar absorbtion is approximately 25,000 m2.

The structural typology, as developed by BGS Engineers, is not traditional. BGS writes, “a bottom-up method is established, that leads to a structure with emergent load bearing capacities. By using probabilistic optimization methods complexity in the topology of structures is achievable: they are directly derived from static capacities, but do not explicitly show the underlying load bearing principles. The inherent load bearing quality is not readable at first glance and emerges as the result of the complex interaction between its single members.”

At the base of the structure is also a large, bulbous building (as seen in the gallery below), and it looks like that is where most of the action is. Elevators ferry folks up toward the spire's bulging heights, too.