Sheng-Yuan Huang, “Living with Sky, Water and Mountain: A Path towards Freedom”

Fieldoffice Architects

Photo by Photo by Min-Jia Chen

Fieldoffice Architects and Sheng-Yuan Huang founded their practice in Yilan, Taiwan, twenty-five years ago. They represent a group of Taiwanese architects who live together and practice architecture collectively to seek freedom through place making. Their projects range from macro to micro scale including infrastructure planning, urban design, landscape, architecture and public space. Over the last two decades, their works not only have encouraged users to freely interpret and express themselves in their daily lives, motivated people to be engaged with material, space and light, but most importantly, have also created a unique dialogue with the natural environment.

Yilan is a semi-urban county in Taiwan that is one-hour drive from downtown Taipei. It’s surrounded by lofty mountains and the Pacific Ocean, with the triangular Lanyang Plain situated at its center. Being an agricultural town, it is a place where residents treasure the abundant water resources, enjoy the outdoor public spaces, and have shared values and a common vision for the future.

Living in Yilan and learning about the place from within, Fieldoffice Architects and Huang have created critical linkages between the communities and the environment via initiating, programming, negotiating, and executing a series of local projects.

 Charles Waldheim and Yun Fu will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Preston Scott Cohen after the talks.

 

FIELDOFFICE ARCHITECTS

As reflected in their creations, the long-term establishment of Fieldoffice in Yilan and with their design seldom straying from the county, all of which illustrate their intention to not execute architecture with the seemingly plausible and common knowledge. Instead, they wish to integrate themselves with the pulse of the local by living a life that is absolutely genuine and thorough. It is through these perceptions that intimate relationships are formed, without the need for words, between design and factors such as the constantly changing environment and applicability. For Fieldoffice, the core of design does not correspond to architectural construction, and does not end after it is completed. They believe that when the architecture is in use, design is still in progress because life (or application) is a live concept, and is forever in a progressive form.

 

SHENG-YUAN HUANG

Sheng-Yuan Huang, born in Taipei in 1963. In the early days he worked in Eric Owen Moss Architects as a Project Associate, and taught at North Carolina State University before returning to Taiwan in 1993.

He firmly believes in the root of architecture that lies deeply within life itself, and life’s truest from is not one of static and tangible qualities, but of dynamic and ephemeral, constantly in change.

As a result, such an acute perception itself has led a direction that is rather ambiguous and whimsical in nature, making Huang and his later established Fieldoffice’s works one of a kind in the architecture realm.

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