MULTI-PURPOSE SQUARE IN TAINAN, TAIWAN
The dismantling of a Shopping Mall as a Chance of Creating a New Public Space
MVRDV
Tainan Spring project recycles an old shopping mall built in 1983; this construction fell into disuse as online shopping expanded. As a result, city government decided to reconvert the site. The strategy adopted is an attempt to recover, through a reinterpretation, the underlying resource that characterised the site: the presence of water. In fact, from the seventeenth century, the Tainan water network was an important part of the development of maritime industry and fishing. The project is configured as a new landscape suspended between the memory of the past and the desire to offer a new urban habitat, in the form of an architectural space built according to the principles of a circular economy and able to extend the lifecycle of pre-existing elements and generate new values. The solid volume of the old building was inverted to create a void. The basement level became a protected urban space lowered, with respect to the street level to which it is connected by stairs.
