One of the benefits of the greening of architecture is the global competition it inspires between cities. Take a good, hard look at what Taiwan’s upcoming Taichung Convention Center will look like. Sure, our own new convention center can boast its own living roof, but does it have a solar-powered skin that naturally ventilates the structure, thereby reducing overall energy consumption while also providing natural light unlike any building heretofore? I think not…

Even though it looks like a bunch of “volcanoes wrapped in venetian blinds” (according to Jerry James Stone of enviro site, Treehugger), several of the “calderas” are living, just like our own convention center. It can probably also calculate pi, make coffee, and kick ass in chess. Your move, Vancouver Convention Center…

According to the architecture firm responsible, Beijing-based Mad Designs Ltd, the…

…design is conceived as a continuous weave of architecture and landscape that blurs the boundary between architecture, public space and urban landscape, proposing a futuristic vision based on the East’s naturalistic philosophy. This project inherits Chinese architecture’s long-standing attitude towards holistic integration and order of space. It employs the Eastern philosophy of a harmonized synthesis between human and nature. In the face of the project’s enormous scale, the architecture no longer exists as a series of individual blocks, but instead is unified as a collective form. The resultant space enclosed within comes into focus, in a natural order emerging from air, wind and light, fostering a resonance between human and nature.

More stunning photos here.