N24 Taipei Fangzhou

Built as a warehouse, it had poor natural light and ventilation. After studying how it would be used and the character of its volume, the design team, in line with the East District Gateway Plan (東區門戶計畫), designed it for office use. The warehouse volume was split apart and extended outwards to let in more daylight, and a raised roof level reorganised the office space and opened up vertical connections. Working from the idea of a flowing community, the team broke down fixed layouts and planned flexible spaces for work, discussion and rest, so that users keep the freedom and room to interact while working. As the building is a historic building, the restoration added steel reinforcement and seismic damping walls, while keeping the exterior materials and the marks of past use, with new steelwork setting off the original materials. Because parts of the original fabric were kept out of respect for its history, the weathered walls and marks of age can be seen from many angles. Upstairs on 2F, in the offices of the blockchain incubation centre (區塊鏈育成中心), the team used seismic damping walls as point structures to deal with problems in the ageing building while keeping the original reinforced concrete structure on show. A spiral staircase in the atrium leads up to the roof. The raised, angled volume over the top-floor atrium has windows in its sides that bring light into the atrium, and its shape echoes the ark (方舟) in the building's name, becoming the symbol of the park entrance. Drawing on observations of how people connect today, and with the building housing the blockchain centre's offices, the team widened the idea of neighbourhood space to interaction within a community. The restoration combines this core idea with its design methods to create a people-centred building.

Translated and shortened by DealTaipei from Taiwan's national tourism database. Sources are on the terms page.