KPF Wraps a Taiwanese Waste Recycling Plant in a Public Fern Garden, Exhibition Hall and Roof Terrace

Most waste facilities are designed to be ignored. They sit behind fences at the edge of town, and their architecture says one thing: nothing to see here. The TCC DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center in Xiulin Township, Eastern Taiwan, takes the opposite position. Designed by KPF for TCC Group Holdings (Taiwan Cement Company), with Trinity Architects & Planners as local architect and OMOMO Co., Ltd. on interiors, the 6,500 m² building wraps a working waste recovery plant in a nature and cultural center. Visitors are not kept away from the industry. They walk around it, look into it, and end up on its roof.

What interests us is not the drum-shaped silhouette, striking as it is against the kilns and silos of a cement complex. It is the claim that a waste plant and a public building can share a single envelope without either one being compromised. The program is layered: public learning spaces ring the industrial core, and the plant keeps its security and operational logic intact. It is Phase I of the TCC Hoping Masterplan, which means this building is also a test case. If the hybrid works here, it sets the terms for everything that follows on the site.

A Drum Among the Kilns

The context does most of the explaining. From above, the round building sits in a landscape of conveyors, chimneys and silos, with a forested mountainside on one side and the sea on the other. KPF did not try to hide the plant among the trees or dress it up as a pavilion. The form is closed and singular, a clear object that reads at the scale of the cement towers next to it.

At street level the picture changes. Scooter riders pass in front of it, cars swing by at dusk, and the building holds its own as a civic presence rather than another shed. That shift between the regional view and the pedestrian view is the first sign the project is aiming at two audiences at once.

A Pleated Skin That Filters, Not Hides

The facade works in two registers. The upper drum is wrapped in vertical fins that twist in front of the glazing and catch low sun; below, faceted perforated panels fold around the curve. Together they give the volume texture without breaking its outline. You read the building as one thing, then discover depth as you get closer.

Perforation is the right choice for a building whose argument is transparency. The panels hint at what lies behind without opening the plant to full view, which matters when security is a real constraint. At the entrance, a timber-framed glass tower cuts through the skin and signals plainly where the public belongs. The reflecting pool at the base softens a wall that could otherwise feel defensive.

The Orange Tower and the Conveyor Bridge

Two pieces of overtly industrial hardware stay exposed, and they are the most honest elements on the site. An orange steel lattice tower stands against the white fins like a piece of the cement plant that wandered over. A steel truss conveyor bridge leaves the building on a diagonal, crosses a road and lawn, and heads toward a neighbouring industrial tower.

KPF could have sleeved these in the same refined skin. Leaving them raw is a smart editorial decision: it keeps the building from tipping into corporate museum territory and reminds visitors that this is a live node in a material network. The contrast between the soft, pleated drum and the hard orange steel does more to explain the project than any interpretive panel could.

A Landscape on the Roof

The top of the building is where the ambition becomes physical. An oval glazed roof sits within curving paths and planted terraces; seen from directly above, it looks more like a park than a plant. Stacked forms produce outdoor terraces for social and educational use, and young trees have been planted with the long game in mind.

Curving perforated concrete walls hold stepped beds and stone steps, and visitors walk among shrubs with silos on the horizon. The framing is deliberate. You are never allowed to forget where you are, and that is the point: the garden does not offer escape from industry, it offers a vantage point on it.

Looking Into the Pit

The single most important image in the set may be the least photogenic. Two visitors stand at a large interior window looking down into a concrete waste pit, a grab bucket hanging above it, orange railings around the edge. This is the project's thesis in one frame. Waste disposal, usually invisible, becomes something you can watch and ask questions about.

The exhibition spaces answer with daylight and distance. A double-height glazed hall with hanging perforated screens looks out to forested hills; a curved steel bench faces tall glass and the sea. The sequence moves you from the machinery of local waste to the wider landscape it affects, which is about as clear a spatial argument for sustainability education as we have seen in a building of this type.

Ferns as a Conservation Program

The fern garden is more than planting. It operates as a conservation facility for endangered and rare fern species, which gives the cultural side of the building a scientific mandate rather than a decorative one. A timber-floored corridor runs beside a fern-covered rock wall, and a covered walkway with granite benches and a steel pergola gives visitors a place to linger with the mountain behind them.

Putting a living collection on top of an incinerator is a provocation, and a useful one. It asks you to hold two ideas together: industrial processing and ecological care can happen in the same structure, a few floors apart.

Evening Life on the Terrace

At dusk the building takes on a different role. Café tables sit in front of the pleated metal facade with the mountain rising behind, and from the air the rooftop garden glows within its ring of lit paths. A public building only earns that label if people choose to spend time in it, and these spaces suggest KPF designed for lingering, not just guided tours.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the layering legible. At ground level, colour-coded zones separate the recycling center from the lobby, multimedia, office and service areas, with a landscaped park alongside. On the third floor a grand stair path curves up from the entry beside the plant volume, and the upper floors spread café, terrace, exhibition, roof garden and fern garden strips around the central plant, leaving a mechanical roof across the north end. The industrial core never moves; the public program wraps and climbs around it.

The north-south section is the drawing to study. Dumping platform, waste pit and incinerator are laid out in sequence, ringed by diagrams of carbon capture and material loops. It reads as both a building section and a process chart, which is exactly the hybrid the project sets out to be.

Why This Project Matters

Infrastructure is where most of the environmental work of the coming decades will happen, and most of it will be built to be ignored. The DAKA center argues that the public deserves to see how its waste is handled, and that architecture can make that visibility comfortable, even pleasant, without turning the plant into a theme park. Layering public program around a secure industrial core is a replicable strategy, not a one-off gesture.

The open question is whether the symbiosis holds once the novelty fades and the later phases of the Hoping Masterplan arrive. A corporate client presenting its own industry as transparent and beneficial will always invite some scepticism. But the building puts its evidence in plain sight, a window onto a waste pit and a conservation garden on the roof, and that is a stronger case than most industrial architecture ever attempts.

TCC DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center (RRRC) by KPF, with Trinity Architects & Planners (local architect) and OMOMO Co., Ltd. (interior design). Xiulin Township, Taiwan. 6,500 m². Completed 2025. Photography by StudioSZ Photo / Justin Szeremeta.

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