Weiwuying National Center for the Arts: How a Military Barracks Became a Theater Without Walls

30-Second Overview: The Weiwuying National Center for the Arts is located in Fengshan, Kaohsiung. Its predecessor was a heavily guarded military zone, officially opened on October 13, 2018. It features an opera house, concert hall, theater, and performance hall, but refuses to be a box that can only be entered by buying a ticket: the Banyan Plaza under the roof allows walking, Tai Chi, yoga, public pianos, and performances to share the same space. The building’s challenge has never been merely about how many audiences it can hold, but how a national-level cultural facility can truly be used by the city.

In 1992, the Weiwuying in Kaohsiung was still a military camp separated from the city by high walls. The grassroots "Southern Green Revolution Movement" did not seek to replace the original site with another type of enclosed large-scale development, but rather to leave the land for an urban natural ecology park and plan an international-level performing arts venue for southern Taiwan within it. This history gives Weiwuying’s starting point something of an anomaly: before the theater was designed, what was fought for was whether people could approach this land. ¹

This land memory was not completely erased. The main building uses the old banyan tree as a spatial imagination, and the surroundings still preserve the context of the urban park and old barracks. Subsequent planning did not cram all activities into the new building, but allowed the barracks, green spaces, and new auditoriums to each assume different public uses. Weiwuying is therefore more like a cultural landscape that grows step by step, rather than a white landmark that fell from the sky on the day of opening. ^{2 3}

On October 13, 2018, the Weiwuying National Center for the Arts opened. From planning to completion, the project spanned three presidents and lasted 15 years. The Presidential Office described this venue in opening reports as a symbol of "spatial martial law lifting" and "cultural equity," because the originally heavily guarded military land, after long-term advocacy by civic groups, finally became a public space that can be shared. ⁴

📝 Curator’s Note: The first audience of Weiwuying does not necessarily sit in the auditorium. He might just walk under the eaves, stop for a while in the shade, and then decide whether to watch a play today.

1992: People Outside the Walls Decided Weiwuying’s Fate First

The construction plan approved by the Executive Yuan originally wrote cultural citizenship into its goals: allowing the public to participate in performing arts and giving southern performing arts troupes a complete venue. The project timeline was listed as Republic of China years 94 to 108, with a budget of approximately NT$10.75 billion. These numbers are large, but they point to a very specific imbalance: large national-level performance facilities have long been concentrated in Taipei; southern audiences had to first pay the cost of transportation and time before they could sit in auditoriums of the same scale. ⁵

This project also stretched the scale of Kaohsiung’s city. Smithsonian explained Weiwuying’s volume to English readers in terms of 1.5 million square feet. Conversions between different units easily make numbers feel abstract, but placing it back on site makes it clear: this is not a theater with a few extra rows of seats, but a massive public machine that must simultaneously handle the city, the park, the backstage, the audience, and fire safety. ⁶

Kaohsiung City Government’s retrospective places this land in a longer timeline. It was originally Fengshan’s flood-defense land, becoming a new soldier training camp after the war. After the Cold War ended and military uses retreated, the 1992 civic movement turned this land toward an urban park, placing the imagination of the "Southern Two Halls" within the green space. The barracks, green space, and theater are thus not three unrelated nouns, but the same land having its use re-determined in different eras. ²

This also explains why Weiwuying cannot be understood merely as a construction project. Data from the Presidential Office and Kaohsiung City Government both indicate that this military space no longer used walls to decide who could enter. The architecture itself therefore bears the memory of public systems. ^{4 2}

4,560 Steel Plates: Learning to Breathe Like a Banyan Tree

When Dutch architect Francine Houben first saw Weiwuying, what she noticed was not a site waiting to be filled, but the old banyan tree. Official introductions state that the building’s flowing shape comes from the sight of the tree canopy, branches, and roots intertwining; in Weiwuying’s official architect feature, Houben’s method is summarized as starting from the local environment and human use, first understanding the local climate, culture, and needs, and then deciding how the building is grounded. ^{7 8}

The roof looks like a white wave; Executive Yuan data breaks it down into 4,560 irregular metal plates, using the stingray and Kaohsiung Harbor’s waves as urban imagery. This is not simply "decorating" Kaohsiung on the building’s exterior: the metal roof simultaneously provides shade, guides wind, and gathers the originally separate opera house, concert hall, theater, and performance hall into a continuous space. ⁵

The Mecanoo project page explains that this center is built on former military terrain, integrated with the adjacent subtropical park. The Banyan Plaza under the roof is a protected public space where residents can pass through day or night, practice Tai Chi, or perform street shows in informal spaces. The building’s core is therefore not a frontal entrance, but a patch of shade that allows people to walk around, linger, and encounter one another. ³

ArchDaily’s 2010 architectural report introduced Weiwuying as located at the northeast corner of the urban park, saying it serves as Kaohsiung’s green lung. ⁹ The roof folds down to the ground, accommodating an open-air theater there, while the surrounding park serves as its stage—this is written in Mecanoo’s own project description. This arrangement extends "watching a performance" from an indoor ticket event to viewing, resting, and passing by in the park. ¹⁰

This roof also binds different professions to the same project. Executive Yuan data lists irregular plates, acoustic specifications, and the pipe organ in the same project summary. Mecanoo points out that the curved steel structure was completed in cooperation between Taiwan’s and the Netherlands’ shipbuilding industries. Kaohsiung’s port experience thus did not only appear in a symbolic shape, but entered the process of how the building was made. ^{5 3}

For a performance venue, this is an important distinction. The audience sees the white wave; the workers face the metal plates, acoustics, backstage, wind and rain, and evacuation routes; when these invisible systems operate together, the Banyan Plaza can maintain that seemingly natural sense of openness. ^{3 11}

People Used the Banyan Plaza Before Buying Tickets

Weiwuying officially calls this space "The People’s Arts Center." The site area is 9.9 hectares, with a building area of 3.3 hectares. The Banyan Plaza, extending from the roof, is open to the public 24 hours a day; the venue can be entered from all directions. This openness is not just a circulation design, but also asks whether a national-level venue can accept visits without a clear purpose: some come for an appointment, some to avoid rain, some just to pass through. ⁹

Around the 2018 opening, this question quickly had a site answer. The Guardian reported that Weiwuying’s opening day attracted over 50,000 people. People took off their shoes, exercised, lay in the shade, and even sang as they walked into the concert hall. These behaviors are not in the traditional theater audience norms, but precisely illustrate Houben’s desired "informality": people do not need to first become an audience member who knows how to enter a theater to have the qualification to use the space. ¹²

Kaohsiung City Government’s 2022 article also recorded similar daily scenes: the public walking in the park, browsing markets, walking children, picnicking; the Banyan Plaza irregularly hosts yoga and open-air movies. These activities do not mean everyone will buy tickets to enter, but they make the arts center no longer only wake up during performance times. ²

📝 Curator’s Note: Opening the door is not difficult; the difficulty lies in making people dare to walk through the door without first proving they understand art.

Four Auditoriums Hide Sound in Five Cores

Weiwuying’s publicness is not at the cost of sacrificing professional venues. Executive Yuan data lists four indoor auditoriums: an opera house with 2,260 seats, a theater with 1,254 seats, a concert hall with 2,000 seats, and a performance hall with 470 seats, totaling 5,984 indoor seats; Weiwuying’s official introduction further explains the openness of the four indoor auditoriums and outdoor spaces, plus the Banyan Plaza available for public daily use. ^{5 9}

The significance of this table is not to turn Weiwuying into a string of specifications, but to see that "cultural equity" requires multiple scales. With only the largest hall, the south still lacks a place for small-scale creations; with only small theaters, it cannot handle international-level productions. Weiwuying places four different distances under the same roof, allowing the venue to face both large-scale programs and works that are less easily seen. ^{5 7}

The pipe organ in the concert hall has 9,085 pipes, one of Weiwuying’s most memorable numbers. Smithsonian’s English report states that this center includes five performance spaces, listing the pipe organ alongside the 2,260-seat opera house and 2,000-seat concert hall as venue features. The numbers here are not showing off scale, but giving a southern city an organ capable of receiving different sounds. ⁶

The Guardian further describes how the concert hall handles the contradiction between "large" and "close": although there are 2,000 seats, the furthest seat is about 30 meters from the conductor; acoustic design also used model testing, attempting to let classical orchestras, jazz, and Taiwanese indigenous mouth organs all find suitable echoes. For the audience, the venue’s value is not just accommodating more people, but ensuring that different forms of performance do not have their sound specifications flattened by a single standard. ¹²

These professional details bring another layer of reality. Engineering research included in Springer uses Weiwuying as a case study to discuss the integration issues of performance-based fire safety design in smoke control, active protection, and fire evacuation review. The more open, composite, and cross-indoor-outdoor a building is, the less it can rely on a pretty roof to solve safety; publicness ultimately falls to the details of engineering, regulations, and management. ¹²

A NT$10.75 Billion Building Must Answer Who Can Use It

If Weiwuying’s story only stopped at "barracks becoming a theater," it would miss the cost of the project itself. Liberty Times Arts reported that Weiwuying signed its planning and design contract in 2007, broke ground on April 7, 2010, was originally estimated to be completed in 2014, but was delayed to 2018 due to multiple design modifications and structural/process issues; in 2020, the Taipei District Court’s first-instance judgment ruled that the Ministry of Culture should pay the architecture firm approximately NT$128.872 million, with the Ministry of Culture stating it would appeal. These controversies do not make the building lose its value, but remind us: cultural equity is not just an opening speech, but a series of public resources, design choices, and responsibility allocations. ¹¹

The Guardian’s review raises another question: Kaohsiung’s population was then about 3 million, yet it had only one 1,600-seat theater; can a massive complex venue accommodating multiple auditoriums continue to fill up after the novelty wears off? This doubt does not contradict the ideal of "no walls." Precisely because Weiwuying wants to become the city’s living room, it must be tested: who stays here, who can afford tickets, who still only passes under the roof. ¹²

The Executive Yuan’s planning for the opening season also explains how this venue is expected to be used. In the 10 weeks from October to December 2018, the original plan launched 41 ticketed programs, accompanied by other public activities. This arrangement shows on one hand that the venue needs to build audience habits with dense programs; on the other hand, it exposes the long-term topic of large venues: opening spotlights can bring people in, but sustained programs, education, and community relationships determine whether people will return. ⁵

Kaohsiung City Government’s record of the three-linked old barracks planning provides another possible answer. These historically significant buildings are expected to be converted into creation, theater, exhibition, and dance spaces, allowing artists and small theater activities to spread from the main building into the park. If Weiwuying is to become the city’s cultural infrastructure, it cannot rely only on a huge main body; it must also allow surrounding spaces to accommodate smaller, slower, and more daily creations. ²

Looking Back at Kaohsiung from the Theater Roof

In the design firm’s description, Houben places Weiwuying in Kaohsiung’s shift from an international port to a diverse cultural city; Mecanoo believes the continuity between the building and the park allows formal performances and informal performances to permeate each other. This vision will not automatically be completed just because a building is built; it must be used out by people walking, teams rehearsing, ticket-buying audiences, and children resting in the plaza, one by one. ³

This path also makes Weiwuying and Kaohsiung’s urban transformation pull on each other. The Ministry of Culture views it as the flagship arts space for southern Taiwan; the architecture firm explicitly connects the former military base with Kaohsiung’s port city transformation. These statements have components of policy vision and cannot be directly equated with the city having completed its transformation; but they at least provide a testable direction: does the venue truly place artists, audiences, residents, and the park on the same daily path? ^{9 3}

Therefore, Weiwuying’s most important performance may not be a specific opening program. It is more like an action repeated every day: a person walks out from the memory of the walls of the former military barracks site, passes under a roof intertwined like banyan tree roots, and sits down to enjoy the cool shade before deciding whether to watch a play. The theater truly opens not just a door, but the path for Kaohsiung people to encounter culture.

Further Reading

• Weiwuying National Center for the Arts Official Introduction

• Weiwuying National Center for the Arts Architecture Firm Project Page

• Kaohsiung City Government: From Barracks to Arts Center, Weiwuying Creates Urban Art Green "Forest" Life

References