On October 10, fans and friends crowded into E.TAY Gallery in Tribeca to hear Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, and Stan Allen discuss Reiser + Umemoto’s architecture alongside noted critic Jeff Kipnis. In the end, Kipnis didn’t show, but fellow theorist Sanford Kwinter, a close friend to Reiser + Umemoto, was able to step into his role on short notice.
Reiser kicked off the evening by presenting a trio of ambitious projects in Taiwan, whose models and drawings the gallery had on display in the exhibition Building Beyond Place. Two of those projects, the Taipei Pop Music Center and Kaohsiung Port Terminal, are currently under construction. The third, a pair of train stations in Taiwan’s Alishan National Scenic Area, is unlikely to be built, but its experimental use of monocoque shells and glued laminated timber lattices expands the firm’s prodigious tectonic repertoire.
As Allen noted, the three projects share more than a common geographic home. “This is a body of work with a strong internal coherence,” he said. “Every new development somehow comes out of the previou…