Taichung Airport City, Taichung, Taiwan

840 Hectare Master Plan / Client: Taichung City / Collaborator: Dragonpolis Engineering Consulting Co., Ltd. / International Competition, First Place

The Taichung Airport City — ‘TAC’ — is a city of cities. TAC is organized around three Precincts: an Airport Precinct, a Trade Precinct, and an Ecological Precinct. Each of these districts optimizes opportunities presented by the adjacent airport, nearby transit networks, and the extensive natural preserve along the site’s western edge. Each Precinct gathers programs and public spaces to maximize its economic, cultural, and ecological advantages. Each Precinct is an idealized city, with its own machinery for assuring its internal aims: aerospace research and commerce; local, national, and global trade; and an upright environmental posture.

If TAC begins with three distinct Precincts, it flourishes in the alchemies taking place among not only these Precincts but also with the airport, Taichung City, and the world. Relationships across the entire TAC site are animated via a system of roads and bike paths, a network of green spaces, a set of figural ‘nodes’ for special programs, and a series of urban ‘tethers’ that stitch the site’s parts together. The entire site perimeter is a perforated edge rather than a hard boundary, a means of accessing the countless opportunities presented within TAC as one approaches the site via the airport, the MRT, or the Airport Avenue.

TAC is a new kind of city, an intensified ‘City Beautiful meets Cité Industrielle’ for the 21st century. In this city, what is built is no longer at odds with what is green. Where we work is no longer distinct from where we find pleasure. Industry and culture are no longer separated undertakings. Local and global exist side-by-side. TAC is unabashedly utopian in its aims, albeit a utopia of immediate relations, where a tree, a laboratory, and an airport thrive together.