Courses

Taipei Little Big

Few cities hold the promise of an urban future as Taipei does. Taipei’s modern evolution – across its Japanese-planned era, its post-war disquiets, and its fearless embrace of capital-M modernity – has given contemporary Taipei a way of being that can only find nourishment in continually reinventing itself. Beyond trying to get the city ‘right,’ Taipei possesses an unrelenting belief in what the city might become.

More than anything else, Taipei thrives across an alchemy of scales. Scales of architecture, program, movement, and public/private life. City blocks filled with towers and pierced by alleys. Big volumes packed with offices and homes, little spaces rumbling with social and economic intricacies. Taipei Little Big will begin within Taipei’s unique Venn diagram of startling scalar overlaps, within which Society and society meet, and architecture has everything to do with how they do.

Taipei Little Big will expand an ongoing research project concerned with how urban densification – building bigger and building skyward – requires the reinvention of public life. The semester’s work will center on a particular pressure point: the lower three to four floors at the base of the density cross-section, where density (life that goes up) and public space (life that spreads outward) have no choice but to meet. This is the city’s ‘urban knee,’ its horizontal-to-vertical bending point, out of which the public life of tomorrow will spring.

The studio will be sited in downtown Taipei, a context rich with design opportunities. Our focus will be on:

  • Alternative programming modes (as public space, as private space, and as hybrids of both) arising with increasingly intertwined public and private governance.
  • Public space in high-density contexts.
  • Structure and horizontal/vertical circulation as they relate to new forms of public space.

While the studio will have an urban tone, our focus will be architectural. Buildings. We’ll start with the premise that a city is made of architecture, as a complement to what is often seen as architecture falling in line with an urbanism that has already been defined. Density provokes new possibilities for markets, movement, spans, landscapes, columns, streets, rooms, sidewalks, and cores. Buildings will be our principal tool in the pursuit of these possibilities.

Your work will concentrate on the lower three to four floors of a larger building design. This focus will allow your work to mature as architecture, especially given the demanding schedule constraints of an academic semester.

The program will include approximately 12,000m2: 2,000m2 of cultural space, 4,000m2 of commercial space, and 6,000m2 of residential space. Your efforts will focus 75% on the cultural and commercial space, 25% on the housing. Put another way, this is an ‘urban prototype studio’ not a ‘housing studio.’

Everyone will work on the same site, located in the Wanhua District, near the Tamsui River. Our site abuts the Sanshui Street ‘wet market’ to its north, the Lungshan Temple subway station to its west, and Taibeihaohaokan Park to its south. The Japanese-built Xinfu Market sits between our site and Sanshui Street. More broadly, our site is immersed in the history of Japanese modernization of social and economic life during the early 20th century. It is also five minute walk from the Lungshan Temple, tethering the area to an 18th century legacy of Chinese settlement. Finally, and most importantly, this district is under significant pressure to modernize yet again, an ever-evolving new frontier for Taipei’s perpetual evolution.

Projects will be done individually. One student, one project. This studio will travel to Taiwan.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.