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RUR Architecture will premiere two films at the 2021 Venice Biennale

2021-05-18T16:00:00-04:00

RUR Architecture will premiere two films at this year’s Venice Biennale. Responding to the social, political, cultural, and environmental upheavals of 2020, the two ten-minute films, Grassroots Institution and Carbon’s Cultural Footprint, came from the mind of firm principal and Princeton University professor Jesse Reiser.

RUR Architecture's Taipei Music Center Performance Hall. Photo courtesy of RUR Architecture

Frustrated with architecture’s tepid responses to the events of 2020, Reiser began exploring ways the field could more forcefully position itself culturally and politically, while mobilizing the full breadth of its expertise.

“As architects, we should apply our hard-earned knowledge and mobilize the full cultural force of architecture to larger issues,” said Reiser. “In the films, we respectively use the example of the Seagram Building and architectural programming to show that architecture, particularly good architecture, plays a critical role in our society, and much is ...

RUR Architecture completes the Taipei Music Center's Performance Hall

2020-09-03T12:52:00-04:00

RUR Architecture's (formerly Reiser + Umemoto) 756,000-square-foot Performance Hall at the Taipei Music Center (TMC) has officially opened with its first concert planned to take place this month. Located in the Nangung District, the project sits on a 9-hectare site in Taipei and is dedicated to the performance, production, and celebration of pop music in Asia.

"Ten years ago, the outskirts of Taipei were characterized by industrial areas situated right up against verdant, forested hills," said Jesse Reiser, Principal at RUR in a statement. "There was, and still is, no gradual transition of city to suburbs – in fact no suburbs at all. The effect of that contrast is a striking juxtaposition between city and nature. Once the old industry was removed and the Taipei Music Center was constructed, we found that nature and new architecture amplified each other’s beauty. Taipei Music Center functions as a discrete urban organism within the natural landscape, an urban peninsula connected to t...