Overview

Solid State will focus on the design of an office and exchange space prototype in Taipei, Taiwan. We will begin where the 20th-century legacy of Taipei’s Zhonghua Road district expired, with architecture at the intersection of national identity, socio-economic progress, and urban vitality.

In the early 1960s, a generation of Taiwanese found a doorway to the world along Zhonghua Road: eight buildings and an urban context filled with audio electronics shops. Solid State starts where electronics–a now anachronistic subject–trailed off, disappearing into an ether of its own making. Half a century ago, we soldered electrical components together, hoping to make something good: a radio, a telephone, a TV. Transistors, tubes, and capacitors have long since been replaced by a different lingua franca whose touchstones are scarcely touchable yet omnipresent: information, media, and belief. Twenty-first-century Zhonghua Road is now immersed in a wholly different (quasi-technological) synthesis comprised of interpretation, extrapolation, and plot…characteristics having more in common with social exchange than parts assembly. We make markets, stories, and relationships. We construct truths alongside wrestling with what truth means. And we want to sort this out while sipping a flat white in a fetching room.

Exchange

Solid State will begin with an assertion: Architecture is never more significant than when it shapes exchange. Visceral, human exchange. A person in a room with other people, a moment’s eye contact, a chair scraping on the floor. Our concern will be with spaces of tangible exchange that feed and are fed by the technological labor enveloping contemporary life.

Focus

Our focus will be on architecture. While we will work in a city, this will not be an urban design studio. Your work might ‘look like a city’ or ‘look like a building,’ but the means you use to get there must be architecture. Buildings. Participants will be expected to develop mature architecture articulated in plans, sections, diagrams, views, models, and other instruments important to our field. The most alluring tools are those right before you: floors, walls, doors, windows, columns, beams, stairs, and ceilings.

Program

The Solid State program includes Office Space and Exchange Space. These programs will be treated hierarchically. Office Space will be framed as generic, a white noise activity essential to contemporary urban life, but, for our purposes, no more than a reservoir for feeding Exchange Space. Our priority will be the design of Exchange Space.

The program will include eighty percent Office Space and twenty percent Exchange Space: eighty percent white noise and twenty percent intensity. Your attention will be reversed vis-à-vis this programmatic distribution: eighty percent on the smaller Exchange Space program, twenty percent on the larger Office Space program. 

There are two reasons for focusing your work on the Exchange Space portion of the program. The first is cultural. Exchange Space is where the most significant opportunities lie for experimenting with work-life relationships. The second concern centers on teaching aims. The overall Exchange Space area–around 3,000m2–is small enough to allow you to develop mature architecture during the time we have this semester.

Travel

We will travel to Taipei during the GSD’s allotted travel week, October 4–11. 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.