Hsinta

Hsinta Ecological Power Plant was a response to an international conceptual design competition per Taiwan administration’s “2025 Nuclear-Free Home” policy and “Hsinta Power Plant Natural Gas Units Replacement Plan”. The brief included the decommissioning of an old nuclear power plant on a neighboring site, and creating a new hyper efficient gas-powered plant on 78 hectares of land which needed to include a flood retention zone basin (5.5 hectares), wetland buffer zone (15 hectares), carbon reduction land (14 hectares) and photovoltaic system. The new design needed to displace conventional notions of power plants, address the location of the power plant in wetlands, and the heritage of a small neighboring historic village in its design, and create an ecological message to be conveyed to the surrounding communities.
We responded to the brief by inserting an elevated park over half the site that included a museum, an auditorium, a viewing tower and walking & bike trails creating a hybrid program of culture and industry that served the outlying fishing communities and salt farmers.
Inspired by the natural beauty of the site and surrounding wetlands our concept creates a new vision for the Hsinta Ecological Power Plant in Taiwan, not just as a power generating complex, but as a park and cultural destination like no other. Designed as an elevated terrace that hovers over the plant, the new park houses a museum for the natural environment that will feature and focus on local ecological and cultural histories. Along with a restaurant, viewing tower, outdoor theater and biking trails, the park affords stunning views of the surrounding area. On axis with the historical architecture, the viewing tower provides a perspective on the past, historical remnants of buildings, and the future of new energy strategies.
The new power plant is organized along the well-trafficked Hsinta Road, its street façade defined by rotating billboard “screen” elements designed to announce its ecological mission to the public. Delineated from the surrounding wetlands by a buffer zone that integrates the text “NATURE IS POWER - POWER IS NATURE”, through landscape elements into the ground, and screened by perforated brick walls on the wetland side that recall the historical architectural elements of the area, the plant is integrated into its natural and cultural environments. The roofs of most of the buildings receive inclined photovoltaic panels to add an architectural and sustainable layer to the roofline. The chimneys are clad in reflective torqued metal, turning the tallest elements of the plant into a slightly distorted refraction of the sky, birds and clouds, to represent a new more integrated mission of human intervention into nature. The transmission towers, situated in the wetlands take inspiration from the cranes flying over the landscape.