“Producing a winning competition entry is one thing, but building it is another,” says Nanako Umemoto. In 2009, the New York firm she founded with her husband, Jesse Reiser, in 1986, was invited to enter a competition for what was then called the Taiwan Pop Music Center. Since the turn of the century, Taiwan had been losing dominance in pop music to Japan and Korea, and its government wanted to create a place, according to the competition brief, “to gather creative talents, trends, and brands.”
Perhaps with the youthful audience for pop music in mind, Taipei’s department of cultural affairs bypassed late-career architects for the invited competition in favor of a younger generation that included Jeanne Gang, Julien de Smedt, and Reiser+Umemoto (R+U).
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