The Taiwanese city of Taichung, third by population size after Taipei and Kaohsiung, seeks to increase its international presence through the promotion of art and culture. Located in the Gateway Park area – a new landscape and cultural precinct in the metropolitan zone of the city – the cultural center concentrates different facilities like a public library of 35,000 square meters, an art museum of 27,000, a multimedia resource center and leisure areas.

The program is contained in ten cubic prisms of different sizes that seem to be randomly distributed but actually sectorize the different uses and relate them through the intersections of their edges. The pieces are covered with a light and porous skin that offers different degrees of transparency, so from outside one can see what happens inside and, with a more gradual transition between exterior and interior, blur its boundaries including open spaces conditioned by this light facade, like terraces, courtyards and gardens. This skin, tightened over the cubes with warped surfaces, gives a sculptural, nautical image to the whole, making it recognizable from the park around it. The ground floor of the prisms is permeable to the environment and defines shaded public spaces.