As an island of immigrants, Taiwan has been in a state of cultural exchange since the end of the war. Traces of Japanese, American, and other cultures are still preserved in Taiwan's daily life. The politics, national consciousness, and architectural vocabulary involved in it also make Taiwan's architectural concepts and characteristics diverse and complex.
However, the major political and cultural changes that began in the 1970s were in a hurry. History has not left enough time for Taiwanese architecture to settle down and merge these complex and diverse faces.
So, how did Taiwan explore the architectural discourse that belongs to Taiwan from such a diverse collection of buildings?
This exhibition gives us some clues.
Exhibition site
Straight and roundabout
The path of modern architecture in Taiwan
"The whole of the building" site
From July 16 to October 16, 2022, "Straight and Roundabout: The Path of Taiwan's Modern Architecture" will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai. The exhibition selects nearly 60 works by 16 representative architects/studios from three generations from the 1940s to the present, divided into three chapters: "The Whole of Architecture", "The Inaction of Architecture", and "The Attitude of Architecture", covering immersive experiential installations, models of various scales, supplemented by vivid and informative manuscripts, films, paintings, photography and documents. The exhibition sorts out the development of modern architecture in Taiwan, shows the latest exploration of architecture in Taiwan, and highlights the architect's caution and reflection on his identity.
Collision and fusion. In the continuous iterative update of straight and roundabout, Taiwan's contemporary architecture has opened up a unique path of evolution.
"Attitude of architecture" on site
Between things
The development of modern architecture in Taiwan
Taiwan is a small island of immigrants, and many people who have left their hometowns to come to Taiwan need to find identity and cultural identity in this land of other places through the construction of space.
Taiwan's public architecture in the 1940s was characterized by Japanese colonialism – the vocabulary of classical European architecture mixed with Japanese rigor, precision, attention to detail and materials in ruins and authoritarian forms to express a sense of colonial modernity through architecture. Since there was no architect system in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, and there was no architect education, after Japan withdrew from Taiwan, the Taiwanese architectural community showed a vacuum. This situation did not change until the late 1940s, when the Western-style architectural system was introduced to Taiwan.
Taipei Jianguo South Road Wang Dahong self-residence photo, Hong Kong M+ collection
However, Taiwan's architectural community did not usher in its own spring, but in the historical process of martial law and the subsequent US aid period, it was always in a bumpy state. Although the intervention of American aid in 1950 promoted the modernization of Taiwan's architectural community and built a genealogy of the construction industry for it, until the 1960s, what constituted Taiwanese architecture was an open question.
Chen Qikuan, Lu SiYi Chapel, Photo: Ruan Weiming
Chen Qikuan, Inside the Methodist Building, Photo: Ruan Weiming
The situation has become increasingly complex as the authorities have embarked on a major construction campaign. More and more buildings that symbolize Chinese culture appear in Taiwan Province, and due to the limited understanding of traditional Chinese architecture by building design and builders, only the symbolic northern palace-style architecture is used as a symbol of traditional Chinese culture, and the new architectural direction of Chinese Mingtang-style architecture with Western high-ribbed concrete structure is encouraged.
Lee Seung-kuan's works in Stuttgart, model, 1954, Photo: Wang Wenqi
Lee Seung-kuan's works in Stuttgart, Interior, 1954, Photo: Wang Wenqi
It is not difficult to see that in the 30 years after the war from 1945 to 1970s, the subjectivity of Taiwanese architecture has always been in the whirlpool of the influence of Japanese and American culture, the contradiction between modernity and tradition, and the dispute over the taoist standard of Chinese culture.
If we look at this historical axis, we can clearly understand the works exhibited in the third section of this exhibition, "The Attitude of Architecture".
Xiu Zelan, Lanyang Girls' Middle School Green Building, courtesy of Yin Baoning
Wang Qiuhua, Photographs from the Memorial Library of Chung-Wong University, M+ Collection, Hong Kong
Zuyuan Li, Taipei 101 Building, courtesy of Li Zuyuan Architects
Courtesy of Han Baode, Luo Shao Mountain Villa, and Huang Jianmin
The first generation of Taiwanese modern architects, represented by Wang Dahong (1918-2020), Chen Qikuan (1921-2007), Li Chengkuan (1915-2007), Wang Qiuhua (1925-2021), xiu Zelan (1925-), was born in the first 20th century and practiced in Taiwan around the 1950s, and their designs unanimously hoped to get rid of the imitation of traditional Chinese architecture under the paradigm of modern international architecture, with a professional perspective and construction methods. Seek the possibility of blending Western modern architecture with Oriental charm.
Wu Zengrong, Dongshi Town Office, picture from "Wu Zengrong 1971-1986"
Yao Renxi, Yuanzhi University Human Resources and Social Security College and Library
Liao Weili, Black-faced Pimple Center, courtesy of Li Architects
The real awakening came in the mid-1960s, when industrialization and urbanization promoted the vigorous development of the construction industry, and between 1960 and 1964, five colleges and universities in Taiwan established architecture departments and vigorously introduced foreign investment. The local cultural identity of Taiwanese architecture was on the verge of erupting under the influence of the American vernacular boom in the 1970s. Taiwanese architecture has returned to the microcosm of the countryside and villages. Investigations and concerns about Taiwan's monuments began.
Therefore, we can see the architectural projects of Li Zuyuan, Han Baode, Yao Renxi and Wu Zengrong from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, which are exhibited in the third section of "Kaidonghexi", and their main feature is to explore local architectural concepts and languages between Kaidonghexi and Hebei.
Chen Xuancheng, Fuye Pavilion, Zhongyuan University "Valley of Springs", courtesy of Chen Xuancheng
The 1970s and 1980s were also the stage of a white-hot dispute between the traditional architectural boom in academia and the boom in commercial real estate development, and the two did not give in to each other and were separated. This led to the exploration of the locality of Taiwanese architecture until the 1980s when it passively looked at traditional Chinese architecture through the impact of the postmodern classical architectural style popular in the United States. After the economic environment has undergone tremendous changes and natural disasters, in the cultural environment where multiple values prevail, Taiwan's architectural field has finally begun to reflect and re-discuss the multi-faceted meaning of society and culture. Among them, Liao Weili, Qiu Wenjie, Guo Xuyuan + Huang Huimei, Chen Xuancheng 5 architects as representatives.
The inaction of the building
A place where modern architecture cannot intervene
Since the 1980s, after the conscious consciousness of returning to local culture has unfolded, the practice of regional architecture has gradually increased, but there are also obvious problems - these buildings are more in architectural vocabulary and symbols as a means of expression, and pay less attention to life and reality scenes, and rarely specifically respond to Taiwan's regional conditions and construction forms.
The question that arises is that Japan, the United States, traditional Chinese culture and Southern Fujian culture flow in the blood of Taiwanese culture in parallel, so how does it affect the lives of ordinary people in Taiwan, and then reflect in the construction of buildings by these people? In other words, what is the real territory of Taiwan?
Xie Yingjun, read aloud the exhibition of illegal buildings: Back Alley Taohuayuan,
Taipei, 2011, courtesy of Changmin Architecture
Architect Xie Yingjun began to make his own explorations around "modern houses" and "buildings without architects". Born in 1954 and graduated from the Department of Architecture at Tamkang University in 1977, the turning point in his architectural career was in 1999. That year, Xie Yingjun participated in the reconstruction of Shao localities in the 9/21 earthquake, and the architectural case of "9.21 House Reconstruction: Shao Resettlement Communities" turned his focus to local narratives. Xie Yingjun believes that the ordinary people's home, as "seventy percent of the human dwelling place", is closely related to the local natural ecology, society, culture and economy, constituting an area that modern architecture and contemporary architects cannot intervene in.
Changmin architecture, reconstruction of Nepal's future village,
Nepal, 2015, courtesy of Changmin Architecture
In the construction practice, Xie Yingjun adheres to the principles of "cooperative housing construction" and "sustainable construction", weakens the role of architects, encourages the personal participation of home occupants, and promotes various colorful appearances of the residence. In the past two decades of architectural practice, Xie Yingjun and his team have helped disaster victims across China build more than 3,000 houses, trying to explore modern regional architectural expressions with light steel, bamboo, wood and other easily available and close to the people's basic materials. "The technical threshold is lowered, and the villagers bring their own creativity to build houses by themselves, which is quite meaningful practice and ideal state," Xie Yingjun once said.
Changmin Architecture, Reconstruction of Yangliu Village, 512 Sichuan Earthquake, Sichuan,
2009/2019, Courtesy of Changmin Building
In Xie Yingjun's practice, the real area of Taiwanese architecture is truly reflected. The region is no longer a closed system, and the regional architecture is no longer an abstract expression of local culture, but a recognition of the daily life residence, which is the concrete embodiment of life and people. The study of regional architecture is no longer limited to the building itself, but is based on the interpretation of regionally diverse communities and cultures.
At the same time, with the development of the practice of Xie Yingjun and his contemporaries, in the road of modern architecture in Taiwan, the competition between East and West, between traditional modernity has finally come to an end, and architecture, as a place for people in real life, has finally returned to the practical and emotional appeal of "people" itself.
The "Inaction of Architecture" section of this exhibition selects 6 representative cases from Xie Yingjun's practice in the past 20 years, accompanied by models, manuscripts and documents, outlining his condensed thinking on the architect's "for" and "inaction".
The whole of the building
Universe Nature Architecture and People
As an integral part of society and cultural expression, architecture is naturally associated with the natural environment and cosmology. That is to say, any building, located between the natural surroundings, also expresses the builder's concept of the universe of heaven and earth. People place themselves in the connection with nature and the universe and obtain the peace of mind.
The "Great Meditation Room" and its interior at the exhibition site
The exhibition "The Whole of Architecture" presents a "Great Meditation Room" built by the Natural Foreign Architecture Studio led by Zeng Zhiwei. At the same time, the meditation room will also display five works from the past of Nature&A, conveying to the viewer the reflections of the new generation of architects represented by Zeng Zhiwei on the relationship between the universe, nature, architecture and people as a whole.
The tranquility and stability of the heart has always been the direction of Zeng Zhiwei's architecture, and his experimental and conventional architecture is also aimed at hoping that people can feel the healing and stability brought by nature and achieve a simple state. In 2004, Zeng returned to Taiwan from the Palau Islands in the South Pacific and decided to build a house. "It has to have a natural, primitive feel, and the use of functionality is vague and even useless. I think modern people are too tired, everything must be purposeful, there must be a result- oriented, then this house, I am empty, or, how you want to define it, you can," talking about the original intention of building this house, Zeng Zhiwei once said in an interview.
Natural Foreign Architecture Studio, exterior of "Less - Primitive Feeling Research Room",
Courtesy of Natural Foreign Architecture Studio
So, on Taipei's Yangming Mountain, Zeng Zhiwei found a vacant lot. When he first went, the open space was full of small insects such as ants and mosquitoes, so Zeng Zhiwei used a greenhouse system similar to a mosquito net to isolate the space inside the house from insects. The greenhouse system uses only sunscreens and glass, and does not use any reinforced concrete. In order not to affect the growth of the tree, Zeng Zhiwei made the top of the house into a curved shape. "Designing with the least amount of force and letting the surrounding primitive environment complete it is the concept of 'less less'," Zeng Zhiwei said.
This is the origin of the experimental field "Little - Primitive Sensation Research Room" in the mountain forest of Shuangxi outside Shilin, which pursues the survival of people in the natural environment with the slightest artificial force and the most invisible method.
Natural Foreign Architecture Studio, inside the "Little Less - Primitive Sensation Research Room",
Courtesy of Natural Foreign Architecture Studio
At the same time, such a practice is a return to the building itself, a re-weakening of the identity of the architect, and the emphasis on expressing the original sense of nature and life, thus carrying a pure poetry. It brings the human mind into the things that have not yet been visualized in the lives of ordinary people, looking for parts that are connected with life and experience, to explore a tension.
The appearance and similarity of the meditation room presented in the "Overall Architecture" section of the exhibition uses the network room system commonly used in Taiwan; Inside, images, lights, sounds, and spiritual objects are blended to stimulate the experiencer's awareness of multiple perceptions and return to the original harmonious physical consciousness and mental state.
【Postscript】The road of modern architecture in Taiwan is between straight and roundabout, as if walking in a circle, architecture was born in the nature, through the surreal expression of multicultural cracks and cultural and conceptual expression, and finally returned to the relationship between man and nature. The subjectivity of people and the regionality of Taiwanese architecture have also become more and more clear in this roundabout journey to find their own anchor point.
(The article is from Artron Art Network)