The Cooper Union hosts a special evening of music and discussion in conjunction with The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture’s exhibition Lyrical Urbanism: The Taipei Music Center. 

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Jesse Reiser AR’81 and Nanako Umemoto AR’83 of Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture, will speak about their design work behind the vibrant and recently completed Taipei Music Center which has become an important urban district where Taiwanese music and culture is cultivated and celebrated. They will then be joined by New York Times music critic Joshua Barone, Luaka Bop Records president Yale Evelev, architectural historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin, architectural theorist and critic Jeffrey Kipnis, and Taipei Music Center spokesperson Sandra Hsu for a panel moderated by Dean Nader Tehrani.

A musical performance arranged by Juliana Shuo-An Chen will feature all-time favorite songs from Taiwanese and Mandarin Pop dating from the early 20th century Japanese colonial period to the present. Reconceptualized into two medley repertoires for string quartet and piano, the performance celebrates the general ambitions of the Taipei Music Center—to cultivate Taiwanese music for a global audience. Musicians include Audrey Chen, Gabrielle Chou, Peiwen Liao, Eric Tsai, and Christine Wu.

Lyrical Urbanism: The Taipei Music Center introduces the complex’s iconic architecture to an American audience through large-scale photographs, videos, music, and architectural models and drawings, and illustrates the many ways the Music Center is currently inhabited—from informal daytime outdoor markets to organized evening music festivals—and how it has become an important urban district where Taiwanese music and culture is projected toward a global audience.

The exhibition is supported by the Taipei Music Center and the Taipei Cultural Center in New York and was made possible through a generous donation from the Taiwan Ministry of Culture and Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.
 
This lecture was made possible by generous support from the YC Foundation, Inc., New York.

Building Access Requirements: Attendees are required to show proof of complete COVID-19 vaccination and booster and must wear a CDC-recommended mask (disposable surgical, KN95, KF94, or N95) while indoors. Cloth masks alone are not permitted, but may be worn as a second layer over a disposable surgical mask.