Taiwan Architecture: a Quarter Century of Change

摘要

Architecture, as it is known by the Western world, was not introduced to Taiwan until the end of the 19th Century. Before then, there was no such terminology, neither was there any similar concept or system about the architecture as in the Western world. Not until Taiwan became the colony of Japan in 1895， architecture was introduced to Taiwan by the colonial government, who started to extensively promote modernization. Nevertheless, how architecture was introduced to Taiwan was different from Japan in the sense that the former's correlation with modernization was much more highly reinforced. Architecture, as a kind of production system, was proactively adopted in promoting industrial development and political control in particular. Meanwhile, the colonial government did not establish architectural professionalism or any college education to train architects. The majority of the people of Taiwan considered architecture a technical tool, instead of a cultural symbol. After World War II, although Taiwan was no longer a colony, and the government had set up professional system for architects as well as related college education, under the authoritarian rule of Kuomintang, architecture remained no more than a technical tool, which was part of the economic development, while architects were regarded as technicians, rather than intellectuals or artists. Only few architects, such as Da-Hong Wang (1917-2018) and Ren-He Chen (1922-89), escaped from this fate. In Taiwan, technical skills in architecture had been generally valued above all for nearly a century; as a result, architecture vaguely conveyed any significance in humanism; such insignificance further led to architecture's irrelevance with local land and life. That is, architecture did not intend to have itself to become part of the context, nor did it have anything to do with users' daily life, virtually and symbolically. It is not surprising that people allow architectural form to copy the well-established model and trends from overseas, that most of architects did not consider themselves representatives of local culture, nor did they have any craving for creating uniqueness for their own works.