The atrium
2003
Stand in the middle of the ground floor and look up. The atrium rises through every floor of the building to a roof of glass, and around it run the balconies of the exhibition levels, painted in bright blues and greens and hung with banners. Escalators zigzag from floor to floor across the void, glass lifts slide up the side, and school parties in coloured caps stream along the balconies. Far above, a thin cable stretches from one side to the other, and if you wait a moment you will see someone pedal slowly across it on the Air Bicycle. The whole building is, in effect, one large room with the exhibitions arranged around its edge.
The design has a purpose beyond spectacle. A science centre depends on being able to see what is going on, and from the atrium you can see almost everything at once: the human body hall on three, the animals on four, the physics crowd on five, and the bridge of steel and wood that crosses the void on floors eight and nine. Look at how the balconies are set back as they rise, opening the space towards the light, and at the exposed ducts, trusses and cable trays that the architects left visible so that children could ask what they were for.
The atrium is also the centre's stage. Large models, a suspended aeroplane or a whale skeleton, have hung here for special exhibitions, holiday events fill the floor with tables and demonstrations, and the annual science fairs that the centre organises for Taiwan's schools are judged in halls that open off it. If you visit on a weekday morning, the noise of several hundred children rising through the void is part of the experience; come after three in the afternoon and the same space is calm enough to hear the lifts.
Did You Know? The Air Bicycle cable crosses the atrium high above the lobby, so the ride can be watched from every floor of the building.
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