Cruise Terminal plus Port Services. Transit hub plus office zone. Movement plus work. One architecture plus another. The sum not only exceeds the parts...it ceaselessly reconfigures them. The cruciform is an endless sum — an architectural tautology in which program, technology, and form perpetually amplify one another.

Two building types are combined: a transit hall (a horizontal bar) and an office building (a vertical slab). The first is plan-intensive; the second is section-focused. The first contains the double life of public and controlled spaces; the second holds the unified workings of the port organization. Both are part infrastructure, part architecture, and part urbanism. Both are part of the public, economic, and working life of Kaohsiung City. Both are more than two.

The intersection of these typologies produces a cruciform — an altogether different typology of extraordinarily variable sectional qualities. Horizontal when horizontal is optimal, vertical when vertical works best, and always exploited across its diagonal. A new public typology climbs laterally from the street to the intensive public spaces of the third level, across the section of the arrival and departure halls, to the elevated terraces of the eighth floor. In a kind of Mayan ascent, this new diagonal typology climbs out of the city, into the cruciform, and beyond its limits, eventually landing on a pair of south and north facing belvederes overlooking the water and the city.

Two sets of escalators are organized along two axes: the first is transverse/public and the second is longitudinal/internal. The transverse escalators carry people across the full spectrum of public life fostered by the cruciform's volumes, faces, overhangs, and intersections. The longitudinal escalators optimize the movement of thousands of people through the terminal each day.

Sum plus. Some more. Some sum.