Power of Emptiness
Architectural Review, Mark #45, 2013
Located in Yilan County, some 65 km south of Taipei, the Luodong Cultural Workshop, with a floor area of only 3,000 m2, occupies a remarkably spacious setting. The architects at Field Office, acclaimed for 30 years of dedication to the improvement of Yilan, used the overwhelming power of emptiness as their point of departure. The traditional market life of the area, along with a collective past based on the forestry industry, supports the design of a continuous roof, which shelters the open, free-flowing space below. Bigger volumes have been elevated to liberate the space at ground level. The steel platform, according to the design team, ‘draws a precise, horizontal line that contrasts with the dynamic activity on the ground; we compare this straight line to the concept of truth, which helps one to comprehend life’s uncertainties.’
The sky-lit roof rests on four rows of thin columns made from weathered steel. Structures on the ground are composed of cast-in-place concrete finished in fir tree-inspired patterns that remind visitors of the timber factories. Mechanical systems built into the central area of the roof leave the edges of the roof flat and its latticework design open, allowing light to pass through. Rather than expressing an air of creativity, the overall materiality of the building speaks of necessity and ecology.
The programme features a cantilevered Sky Gallery, a sports ground, an eco-park, and a winding path used by cyclists and joggers that connects the building with residential blocks and other nearby destinations. The Luodong Cultural Workshop has already successfully hosted rock concerts, art and architecture exhibitions, and a film festival. Its versatility and scale makes the venue an ideal choice for a wide variety of activities and events.
While effectively satisfying the demands of the area’s art and cultural circles, the project is in itself a contemporary interpretation of ‘culture’. Small rehearsal and meeting rooms at ground level and on the upper floors are open to local groups and organizations, which need only to schedule the use of the space. School children frolic on the grassy riverbanks, and pedestrians cross the grounds on their way to the market. ‘Culture’ as a solid entity dissolves, only to emerge as a means of constructing and maintaining identity, and as a spatial enactment of an expanded notion of citizenship. The project represents a monumental shift in the collective mind about the role of public architecture and civic culture.
Yilan has been noted in Taiwan for a high level of public awareness with regard to the built environment. During the last two decades, a steady number of low-budget public projects have been realized and recognized both at home and overseas. The Luodong Cultural Workshop was developed over the course of 14 years. Initially proposed in 1998 as a branch of the Yilan County Cultural Center, located to the north and erected in 1978, the project experienced a sequence of government administrations and ministers of culture. The 20-year gap between the completion of the first cultural centre and the initiation of the ‘branch’ marked a significant change in plans for the development of Yilan, which now has a dynamic civic life that parallels the urban character of Taipei. Over the years, Yilan County’s highly engaged citizens have come to demand unique spaces marked by equality and openness, in preference to the sort of iconic designs that signify ‘high culture’ in many of today’s global metropolises. Lacking a set budget and a definitive brief, the Luodong Cultural Workshop might have been abandoned at the halfway point were it not for the persistence of local citizens, officials and organizations.
Compromise was the name of the game, however. District government re-elections and their consequent fiscal changes forced the architects to dispense with lifts, as well as certain services and other functional elements, to accommodate the budget. They also had to cut the last span of the roof, thus partially exposing the gallery. The cantilever that resulted, however, thrusts dramatically forward – at an oblique angle to the latticed roof – in accordance with both modernist and vernacular architecture.
The Luodong Cultural Workshop challenges the default parameters of the building site and provides the population in this part of Taiwan with unconventional opportunities for cultural enrichment and fuller lives. It is the product of architectural imagination, subtlety and precision combined to create a light and airy sense of place. It is a cultural centre that exists 24/7, or not at all.
TED, or The Elusive Dots
Excerpt, Concert Review
...For those who are familiar with “Wichita Vortex Sutra”, the Allen Ginsburg-inspired piece for reciter and piano by Philip Glass, you may come to know “TED” expecting similar ideas about instrument-text narrative. Some did assume during the rehearsals preceding the performance that what they heard were “singled out moments of the bigger picture”. Yet all shall soon realize that it is far more ambitious and perplexing to grasp, and the fragmented moments are not parts but the core.
Narrative, in its traditional sense, is the deliberate channel through which any substantial message can be sent out. In classical music you are greeted with narrating efforts from the whole set: the tonality, structure, techniques, instrumentation and libretto, all possessing in one way or the other a unity in purpose. The modern composers in favor formal experiments often deliberately avoid classical structure when building their own eloquent object of speculation. Words, if employed, though spoken rather than sung, are mostly destined to be heard, as emotional outbursts, agitated claims, and mesmerizing tales. Nevertheless they utilize whatever in the warehouse to justify their creative choices with a cohesive message. It is safe to say that to narrate is to compose: only with a working narrative can musical pieces construct meaning. Yes, a bit like coding, where rules are obeyed but results vary.
On the opposite, “TED” seems to believe in a whole new realm of identities and purposes in chamber music. In the absence of any clear structural design, tensions arrive in a sudden and then remain unresolved. (Cadenza, anyone?) Changes in harmony and meter of its music are more extreme, more frigid, and its themes (if any) and textures as continually changing, morphing without repetition. There is of course the unpredictable instrumentation, but such creativity also lacks cohesion in style or emphasis in character that makes it hard to decipher any meaning.
On the textual side, there are moments when flat vowels rise from conspiratorial whisper to urgent drone; but for most of the words the delivery is flat and indifferent. It is worth mentioning that the performance goes without a libretto, probably because the composer earlier admitted in an interview with students that he did not consider legibility an issue. What is at stake here is not only the text but also the whole idea of “TED”, its motivations, aspirations and emotions.
Corrupt Originals:
Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture in China
Excerpt, Master's Thesis
Critical and conceptual practice in architecture in late 20th century was marked by a persistent quest for agency. From Giedion and Zevi’s “operative” history to the radical visions of Archizoom and Superstudio, from Tafuri’s “productive criticism” to the post-critical dialectics of late, this multi-faceted field has been signalized by a flow of interpretations and justifications of its own relevance. While a crisis of criticality and its many platforms may seem to loom in an era of escalating pragmatism, a renewed prominence in critical discourse has found its way into previously less engaged societies. Countries like Russia, Brazil and Portugal are nowadays enthusiastically communicating architecture in distinct forms and scales. Among these new actors, China has established itself as a particularly arresting case: a country equally empowered and troubled by unprecedented growth, it seeks to sustain the centralized, top-down governing logic against the aspiration of a civil society from bottom up.
This contesting interface is explicitly embodied in the coalescence of forces between two communicative practices: exhibiting and censoring. By contextualizing censorship as a pervasive “ideology of intervention” throughout the course of cultural production, this thesis attempts to yield a specific realm of speculation, in which the act of exhibition making can be examined when constantly negotiating with political, social and economic agendas. Operative logics, cultural assumptions, conditions of production, ideological commitments, and production and survival of iconicity make up the components of the analysis. Between control and disruption, regulation and interpretation, compliance and resistance, the thesis proposes an original type of agency in China’s architectural exhibitions, in the power struggles but also liaisons between architecture and a variety of external actors. The simultaneously corrupt and original productions within this context are forging new disciplinary and programmatic possibilities.