After two years of planning, Reiser + Umemoto announced the groundbreaking of the Kaohsiung Port Terminal happening this month in the city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The architecture firm won the 2010 international competition to design the cruise ship terminal and port service center.

Reiser + Umemoto also celebrated the groundbreaking of another major Taiwanese development they won, the Taipei Pop Music Center, on June 19, 2013. — bustler.net

The highly popular Taichung City Cultural Center International Competition in Taiwan just announced its much anticipated list of winners, and it's the Pritzker Prize-winning team of Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA with local partner Ricky Liu & Associates to snatch the top honors. — bustler.net

Taipei has high hopes of becoming the next World Design Capital (WDC) designated city in 2016, and so far, it's looking pretty good: The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) announced from its Montreal headquarters today that "members of the selection committee identified the City of Taipei as the only municipality to move on to the next phase in the process towards becoming the WDC 2016." — bustler.net

French firms OXO architects and Nicolas Laisné Architecte Urbaniste have sent us "TCC Garden," the team's joint entry to the Taichung City Cultural Center competition in Taiwan — bustler.net

Polish architecture & urban design firm KAMJZ has sent us its very intriguing entry to the Taichung City Cultural Center competition in Taiwan (previously on Bustler). The scheme is a collaborative effort together with Buro Happold. — bustler.net

Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture PC. is proud to announce the groundbreaking of the Taipei Pop Music Center an urban complex dedicated to the celebration, production and performance of Taiwan's pop music. This iconic center features a variety of performance venues including three live houses, an outdoor performance space for 3000 and the Main Hall a faceted fan shaped building with a seating capacity of 5000.

Since announcing the five shortlisted finalists to Taiwan's Taichung City Cultural Center competition last week, we have been receiving a steady stream of further competition entries from around the world. Here's one from Moscow-based firm Architecton which moves the "Gate" metaphor to the core of its design concept. — bustler.net

French-Californian practice Sériès et Sériès has shared with us its entry to Taiwan's Taichung City Cultural Center competition [...]. The design team's engineering partner was Buro Happold. — bustler.net

Five teams have recently been shortlisted as stage one winners in the international architecture competition for the design of a new City Cultural Center in Taichung, Taiwan. Taichung, after the merger of Taichung City and Taichung County the third largest city in Taiwan, established this competition to distinguish itself from the other major Taiwanese cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung. — bustler.net

The results of the Taiwanese Keelung Harbor Service Building competition were announced a few days ago with Neil M. Denari Architects taking the First Prize [...]. Today we're very excited to also publish one of the five finalist entries, designed by LA-based Platform for Architecture + Research in collaboration with joint tenderer Sériès et Sériès. The design team's engineering partner is Buro Happold. — bustler.net

In the international competition for the New Harbor Service Building in the major Taiwanese port city of Keelung, a shortlist of five teams has just been released. Among the nominees are well-known firms like Asymptote Architecture, Neil M. Denari Architects, and Mecanoo architecten. The international jury also included American architects Aaron Betsky and Michael Speaks. The final competition winner will be announced in September. — bustler.net

Google’s new $700 million data centers in Taiwan will make ice at night, when electricity is significantly cheaper, and use it to cool the buildings during the day, reports Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge. It’s called thermal storage, and it’s basically a battery, but for air conditioning. — grist.org

This week, MVRDV, The Why Factory and the JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture opened the fourth edition of the exhibition series “Museum of Tomorrow” in Taipei. Under the title “The Vertical Village” the exhibition explores the rapid urban transformation in East Asia, the qualities of urban villages and the potential to realize this in a much denser, vertical way as a radical alternative to the identical block architecture with standard apartments and its consequences for the city. — bustler.net

The 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners were announced today with an official presentation ceremony to follow on November 7th at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. [...] Hsieh Ying-Chun is the Grand Prize Winner; he will receive $100,000 from the foundation with no strings attached. Hsieh is a leading Taiwanese architect who for over a decade has deployed his talents in rural areas decimated by natural disaster. — bustler.net

We recently published one of the two winning entries to the Kaohsiung Port Station Urban Design competition by De Architekten Cie. Here is now also the second of two entries that managed to win the jury's highest praise, the Excellence Award, by AGER Group’s Boston Studio. — bustler.net