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'Landscape Architecture' Reaches New Heights

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September 30, 2011

'Landscape Architecture' Reaches New Heights

By Cheryl Kaften
TMCnet Contributor

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As high as the Empire State Building with a footprint of 2.5 acres, a Bionic Arch designed for the City of Taichung, in Taipei, Taiwan, looks like a fantastical, perpendicular topiary. All facilities and equipment within the Arch —exhibition rooms, lobby, information center, lobby elevator, shops, restaurants, observatories, laboratories, and offices—are designed as suspended gardens in the sky. What’s more, the blueprints combine both solar and wind technology, for complete off-grid power generation and zero emissions.


According to Vincent Callebaut, the 34-year-old Belgian architect who designed the Bionic Arch for the international competition, the Taiwan Tower Planning, Design, and Construction Supervision Service Project, “The concept of the Bionic Arch is the development of a vertical landscape.”

The contest was announced last year by the Urban Development Bureau, Taichung City Government, as part of an innovative and visionary urban design project for the municipality, following the relocation of the international and military Taichung Airport to the vicinity.

The new Taichung Gateway (News - Alert)–Active Gateway City is envisioned as an “oasis” for trade and economics, research and development, education, ecology, biodiversity, culture, and urban life. It will comprise a park, a campus, an exhibition center, and the Taiwan Tower (the culmination of the design contest). The Taiwan Tower will be located at the southern tip of the Central Park, across from the Economic and Trade Park to the north. At the tower, visitors will be treated to a panoramic view of the city and its natural surroundings, including the Dadu Mountain, the Taiwan Strait, and Taichung Harbour.

According to Callebaut, the Bionic Arch “integrates directly all sustainable technologies and its design presents an aerodynamic geometry inspired by nature in the axis of dominant winds.” The “skin” of the arch is skin made of heat insulation solar glass and photovoltaic cells and —with its three vertically superposed wind turbines—“Its energetic results are positive and enable to assure not only the self-functioning of the tower but also the nocturnal lighting of the Gateway Park,” Callebaut said.

Thanks to its suspended gardens—real bio-reactors for purification—the tower becomes a proactive structure that respects its environment, by recycling air, water and wastes and giving a new symbiotic ecosystem for the sub-tropical multi-scaled biodiversity of Taiwan.

The structural concept “exoskeleton” and the design of the structure are strong enough to withstand earthquakes, typhoons and the type of terrorist attacks that the United States experienced at the World Trade Towers.

Callebaut, is perhaps best known to date for his ecological project, “Elasticity,” an aquatic city of 50 000 inhabitants entirely autonomous, which won the won the Grand Architecture Prize Napoléon Godecharle of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Brussels in 2001. In addition, in 2009, his major sustainable projects were exhibited at the World Expo at Shanghai in seven pavilions to illustrate the “Ecopolis of Tomorrow.” Last year, his architectural firm won the first prize winner for the design and construction of a luxurious residential tower at the bottom of the Taipei 101 Tower in the heart of Taipei, Taiwan.

Although his design is being hailed as “the greenest architectural proposal ever,” Callebaut is not among the winners of Stage One of the competition, who include:

  • CRAB Cook Robotham Architect4ural Office/Peter Cook—Unit4ed Kingdom
    • Joint Tenderer: Tai Architect & Associates/Tai, Yus-Tse, Buro Happold
  • Soma ZT GmbH/Martin Obserascher, Nationality—Austria
  • HMC Group/Raymond Pan, Nationality—United States
  • Dorin Sterfan— Romania
  • Sou Fujimoto Architects/Sou Fujimoto— Japan

Final contest results will be disclosed in November.


Cheryl Kaften is an accomplished communicator who has written for consumer and corporate audiences. She has worked extensively for MasterCard (News - Alert) Worldwide, Philip Morris USA (Altria), and KPMG, and has consulted for Estee Lauder and the Philadelphia Inquirer Newspapers. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves

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