The Xiqu Center, a performance venue and the new home for Chinese opera, recently completed in Hong Kong’s new multi-billion dollar West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). The Xiqu Center is the first performance venue in WKCD and also the first venue in the world designed for classical Chinese Opera.
The main theater is suspended 90 feet in the air to open up the entire ground level as public space. “It results in a new paradigm of an open, shaded, protective, and generous public plaza inHong Kong’s legendary dense urban fabric,” says John Wong, FASLA, FAAR, Design Principal and Chairman, SWA, in a release.
Xiqu’s ground floor serves as an urban stage designed to facilitate movement, provide a gathering space, and enhance the visitor experience. The landscape and architecture blend together to create a space that feels both indoors and outdoors and features groupings of trees at each entry and a naturally ventilated open-air interior courtyard. Another two outdoor gardens flank the main performance hall on the fourth floor.
See Also: SWA designs people-centric landscape and public realm for Chase Center
The exterior of the building is curved three dimensionally with arched openings strategically located at all corners. A lifted facade provides three main entry areas with access to the ground level. Each entry level is determined by the surrounding site conditions. A public amphitheater with an outdoor performance area is also included.
Revery Architecture and SWA collaborated on the project’s design.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Bowing to Tradition
As the home to Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the oldest theatrical company in the nation—12 Holyoke Street had its share of opening nights. In April 2002, however, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences decided the 1888 Georgian Revival building no longer met the needs of the company and hired Boston-based architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates to design a more contemporary facility.
| Aug 11, 2010
Team Tames Impossible Site
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation's oldest technology university, has long prided itself on its state-of-the-art design and engineering curriculum. Several years ago, to call attention to its equally estimable media and performing arts programs, RPI commissioned British architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw to design the Curtis R.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Hanna Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio
Between February 1921 and November 1922 five theaters opened along a short stretch of Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland, all of them presenting silent movies, legitimate theater, and vaudeville. During the Great Depression, several of the theaters in the unofficial “Playhouse Square” converted to movie theaters, but they all fell into a death spiral after World War II.
| Aug 11, 2010
Biograph Theater
Located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Victory Gardens Theater Company has welcomed up-and-coming playwrights for 33 years. In 2004, the company expanded its campus with the purchase of the Biograph Theater for its new main stage. Built in 1914, the theater was one of the city's oldest remaining neighborhood movie houses, and it was part of Chicago's gangster lore: in 1934, John Dillin...
| Aug 11, 2010
Platinum Award: Reviving Oakland's Uptown Showstopper
The story of the Fox Oakland Theater is like that of so many movie palaces of the early 20th century. Built in 1928 based on a Middle Eastern-influenced design by architect Charles Peter Weeks and engineer William Peyton Day, the 3,400-seat cinema flourished until the mid-1960s, when the trend toward smaller multiplex theaters took its toll on the Fox Oakland.
