Then and Now: Ximen Circle, part 2

1970-2010

Ximen Circle is a particularly fascinating place in Taipei's history in no small part because it was arguably the city's most fantastically complicated and chaotic intersection. Up until the end of the 20th century, streets branched out in seven directions, and furthermore, the entire traffic circle was bisected by a busy at-grade railroad crossing. Meanwhile, pedestrian circulation was facilitated by several elevated pedestrian walkways. Visible in the right foreground of the original photo above is a portion of Zhonghua Market (中華商場), an eight-block market complex that occupied the center of Zhonghua Road (中華路), alongside the railroad tracks.

Ximen Circle in 1945 (photo credit below)

The intersection's configuration dates back to the early days of Japanese colonization. After the Japanese empire took control of Taiwan in 1895, it took few delays in shaping Taipei into the island's provincial capital. In 1900, the colonial government began to dismantle its city walls, replacing them with a series of boulevards, including Zhonghua Road on the western side. The walled city's western gate was demolished and replaced by an elliptical plaza and traffic circle, shaped like a smaller version of the Place de la République in Paris. Railroad tracks were built in the median of Zhonghua Road shortly afterward.

Ximen Circle's railroad tracks and central plaza, 1978 (photo credit below).

That design remained essentially unchanged up through the 1980s, when the city embarked on several ambitious efforts to modernize its infrastructure. Underground railroad tunnels were built to replace all at-grade tracks west of Taipei Main Station; the Zhonghua Road rails were removed when the tunnels opened in 1989. Demolition of the struggling Zhonghua Market complex began in the following year. Later in the 1990s, Ximen Circle was rebuilt as a four-way intersection during construction of the Taipei Metro's first east-west subway route, now the Nangang Line. Both projects were completed in 1999.

1972-2010

Then and Now photographs:
1. Carpenter, N. "Oversea Chinese Emporium Ltd." 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 24 Jul. 2010. http://members.tripod.com/Shulinkou/shimading2.jpg.
2. Duffin, L. "1972 shot of the same location and view as photo #1 above." 1972. Shulinkou Air Station. 24 Jul. 2010. http://members.tripod.com/Shulinkou/tpe019a.jpg.
Other photographs:
1. "0005017388 - 台北市西門町." 1978. 行政院新聞局. 國家文化資料庫. 行政院文化建設委員會. 2 Aug. 2010. http://nrch.cca.gov.tw/metadataserverDevp/DOFiles/jpg/00/05/12/33/cca100069-hp-0006640030-0001-i.jpg.
2. U.S. Army Map Service. "Taihoku-Matsuyama." 1945. Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. University of Texas Libraries. 2 Aug. 2010. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/formosa_city_plans/txu-oclc-6565483.jpg.

Then and Now: Ximen Circle (西門圓環), Taipei

1970-2010

Since the end of World War II, Taipei's Ximending district (西門町) has been one of the city's largest retail and entertainment hubs, as well as a major center of local youth culture. The neighborhood is one of few places in Taiwan to have retained its Japanese colonial period name, literally "west gate town," owing to its location immediately outside of Taipei's western walls. Though the city walls were dismantled in 1905, Ximending's main entrance continues to face the major intersection that has replaced the western gate, long known as Ximen Circle.

The intersection underwent an enormous reconfiguration during the 1990s, which included the conversion of the traffic circle into a single, essentially four-way crossing, replacing the central plaza with smaller ones along the edges, one of which is shown above. The Ximen Taipei Metro station opened in 1999, and has consistently been one of the most heavily used stops in the system.

Original photo: Carpenter, N. "Looking back at the traffic circle in the opposite direction." 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 23 Jul. 2010. http://members.tripod.com/Shulinkou/shimading5.jpg.

Then and Now: Intersection of Zhongshan and Minquan Roads looking south, Taipei

1970-2010

The Zhongshan and Minquan Road intersection is still busy today, although it's no longer one of downtown Taipei's most important crossroads. Most of Taipei's major avenues were reconfigured and landscaped in the 1950s and 60s; the trees running down Zhongshan Road's two median strips in the original photo appear to have been planted only several years earlier.

The hotel building in the background with the circular rooftop restaurant, known as the Center Hotel in 1970, was later reopened as the Fortuna Hotel (富都大飯店), which closed in 2007 and was demolished shortly afterwards. The four two-story commercial buildings just off of the street corner on the right side still remain, although somewhat hidden underneath a billboard addition.

Original photo: Lentz, R. "Central Hotel and Back Street Market" 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 19 Jul. 2010. http://shulinkou.tripod.com/rlcentralhtl70.jpg.

Then and Now: FuShun St, Taipei

1970-2010

In the 1960s and 70s, the side streets off of Zhongshan North Road, Section 2 housed a number of bars and nightclubs that were mainly popular among American servicemen and other expats. Pictured here is FuShun Street (撫順街), once home to a number of such establishments like the Queen's Club, the Hawaii Bar, and the Arcade Bar.

40 years later, the American military presence in Taiwan is long gone, and the neighborhood is no longer much of a nightlife hotspot. Today's FuShun Street, substantially more built up, is a rather typical-looking side street, and almost completely unrecognizable from its former appearance. However, one building seems to remain from the original view: the bunker-like concrete building in the right foreground.

Original photo: Carpenter, N. "Looking down Fu-Shun Street." 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 13 Jul. 2010. http://shulinkou.tripod.com/queens2.jpg

1970s Taipei through American eyes

It's not the most obvious place one would expect to find a bunch of old photographs of Taipei, but a website (on Tripod, no less) maintained by former U.S. military personnel stationed at Shulinkou Air Station happens to have a small but valuable collection of such photos. The 6987th Security Group was one of many American military units stationed in Taiwan between 1955 and 1977, during the period of formal military cooperation between the United States military and the Republic of China government. The website is a messy one to navigate, but it offers a few fascinating glimpses of expatriate life in the island's capital city.

Minquan E. Road east of Xinsheng N. Road, 1970

Their photographs reveal a city that was in many ways dramatically different from contemporary Taipei, and one which doesn't usually invite much nostalgia. In the 1970s, it was by all accounts a rather drab, gritty place, with little of the cosmopolitan glamour of other East Asian metropolises like Hong Kong or Tokyo. Despite rapid population growth, the central city remained relatively low-slung, with extremely few high-rise buildings. The city's downtown remained largely concentrated along Zhongshan Road, and had yet to be be overtaken by fast-growing districts to the east.

View north on Zhonghua Road, 1972

Unfortunately, many of the vantage points that these photographs were taken from no longer exist or are no longer publicly accessible, a principle cause being the destruction of the elevated pedestrian walkways that once crossed over most of the city's major intersections. Again, it's not an easy website to get around, but for anyone acquainted with contemporary Taipei, it's worth a look.

Photo credits:
1. Carpenter, M. "Making the rounds in Taipei." 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 11 Jul. 2010. http://members.tripod.com/Shulinkou/dawgx3b.jpg.
2. Swallom, S. "The intersection of Min Chuan East Road and Hsin Shen North Road." 1970. Shulinkou Air Station. 11 Jul. 2010. http://shulinkou.tripod.com/pbminchuanrd2.jpg.
3. Duffin, L. "1972 shot of Chung-Hua Road." 1972. Shulinkou Air Station. 11 Jul. 2010. http://shulinkou.tripod.com/ldshim7178.jpg.

Then and Now: A view down SongZhi Road, Taipei

2007-2010

Not knowing of any easily accessible repository of historic images of Taipei, I'm making do with some of my own photos from the past few years. Fortunately, the city seems to grow fast enough in a few places for these montages to be decently interesting less than 3 years later.

This is part of the city's Xinyi district viewed from one of Taipei 101's elevated walkways. The 2007 photo shows the Citibank building still under construction, as well as one of the cranes for the now soon-to-be-completed President Hotel tower.

Back streets of Dongqu (東區), Taipei

Essentially built from the ground up in the 1970s, Taipei's "East District" (Dongqu - 東區) remains the city's premiere dining, shopping, and nightlife mecca. While its bustling main avenue, Zhongxiao East Road (忠孝東路), is home to its major restaurants and department stores, some of Taipei's best city life is to be found in the district's little side streets and alleyways.

In terms of scale and pace, these streets feel worlds removed from Zhongxiao E. Road. Though packed with shops and businesses, life move a bit more slowly here. Taipei often lays claim to being the most relaxed of Asia's Chinese-speaking metropolises, and nowhere is that more evident than here. At nightfall, once the brutal heat of day disappears, the streets begin to fill with a steady stream of beautiful Taiwanese flâneurs lasting deep into the night.

The neighborhood is home to an incredibly varied retail mix that includes boutiques, restaurants, tea houses, bars, and lounges of all price levels, not to mention the city's ubiquitous food carts. Equally impressive is the proximity and coexistence of multinational mega-retailers and cheap roadside stalls, as pictured above.

Coming from a Western city-dweller's perspective, it might seem amazing that the area has any street-level vibrancy at all. Off of the major avenues, there are just about no sidewalks - narrow streets are shared by cars, scooters, bikes, and pedestrians. It takes sharing the road to a whole new level. But somehow, it all just comes together perfectly. It's hard to find downtown city neighborhoods that feel as lived-in and intimate as these do.

Utility box art, Taipei

Though I'm positive that painted utility boxes have been around since my childhood, it was not until very recently that I began to notice them again. The metal boxes used for electric, telephone, and water utilities are fairly common fixtures on the city's streets, and while the majority of them aren't decorated, a very noticable selection of them are.

Just about every box that has been painted features a brightly colored, somewhat kitschy landscape that wouldn't be out of place in a childrens' book. Chunghwa Telecom's (pictured at top) generally seem to be a cut above the others. Otherwise, they can get a little ridiculous and tacky, especially once cartoon characters are involved.

Even so, it's an interesting concept that to some degree adds a touch of "friendliness" to otherwise rather utilitarian streetscapes.

FuTai Street Villa (撫台街洋樓), Taipei

The FuTai Street Villa (撫台街洋樓), contrary to what its name might suggest, is found today at no. 26, YanPing South Road (延平南路) in Taipei's ZhongZheng district, one of the main thoroughfares of the city's colonial-era hub. According to the City's Department of Cultural Affairs, the structure was completed c. 1910, and housed offices and a storefront for a Japanese liquor boutique. The building's design presents an exceptional juxtaposition of 19th century French villa-inspired composition with a sidewalk arcade typical of vernacular commercial buildings in Taiwan. It also seems to be the only colonial-era structure that remains on the street.

Its immaculate appearance however, hides a fairly turbulent history. Following the end of Japanese occupation, the property was seized by the Nationalist government's Ministry of Defense, and mostly left vacant for half a century. It was not until 1997 that the FuTai Street Villa was designated historic by the city government, launching a historic preservation battle with the Ministry of Defense that would last nearly a decade. In 2002, the building fell victim to an act of arson which caused most of the upper floors to collapse (though its masonry was thankfully salvable, along with its building plans). As if that were not bad enough, the Ministry provoked greater anger and legal opposition when it attempted to auction off the damaged property.

Ultimately, the preservationists emerged victorious, as reconstruction and renovation of the damaged structure began in 2006, presumably under the auspices of the Ministry of Defense. Work was completed in early 2008, and the building has been designated as the future site of the Taipei Film Center (台北攝影中心). As to how far those plans have progressed, I am yet uninformed.

Note: If anyone is more informed about this building than I am, please correct me since I might very well have misunderstood something during the course of my research.

Sources:
1. http://www.culture.gov.tw/building/view.php?vid=948&page=
2. http://www.tonyhuang39.com/tony0530/tony0530.html
3. http://www.odie.idv.tw/Taipei/FutaiStreetMansion.html

Nangang Metro Station (南港捷運站)

On Christmas Day, the Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation opened the gates at Nangang Station, the newest addition to an elevated and underground rapid transit network which now includes 70 stations. Nangang is the temporary terminal on the Nangang Line's extention, which upon completion next year will connect the district's growing high-tech office cluster and Exhibition Hall to the city's metro system. As a regular user of public transit in the United States, it is incredibly refreshing to travel to another place where public transit seems to be in a consistent state of growth rather than stagnation, and doesn't operate under the constant threat of budget and service cutbacks.

Up until roughly a decade ago, land in this area of Nangang was largely dedicated to agricultural and light industrial use. Though the area in the immediate vicinity of the station is sparsely populated, the station seems to already receive a fairly steady stream of users, probably since it is still one of the only stations that serves any portion of Nangang.

I was happy to see that the station is better designed than the older stations on the Nangang Line, most of which are rather austere and indistinguishable. Here, the standard grey ceramic tile floors are supplemented with cool stone stairwells, and the walls and ceilings are fitted with light green color scheme (especially refreshing in a city enamored of grey and light pink). Furthermore, the station includes an unusually large amount of public art in the form of murals, which all seem to have been done by the same artist. One installation in particular, the mural of chairs pictured below, is quite a hit with families with children.

While Nangang Station is pretty small as far as Taipei's metro stations go, it is quite successful at creating an open and inviting space for transit users. This is also helped by low and unobtrusive fare turnstiles, clear signage and lighting, open information kiosks, and ample indoor plantings.

Of course, it would be un-Philadelphian of me not to compare this to SEPTA's underground stations, which fall woefully short of international standards. Near century-old structures are a problem, but it's still no reason to have stations that feel like Cold War bunkers. In fact, there are quite a few things that SEPTA could do without completely rebuilding its stations. SEPTA's fare collection modernization plan will in a few years present an amazing opportunity to replace bulky and unwieldy turnstiles with ones that feel less obtrusive and defensive. It would also do well to remove the mesh window barriers that cage in certain platform areas like those at 40th Street. And something as simple as maintaining year-round plantings could make a great difference, if SEPTA could get its employees to care. The list goes on, but the point is, for Philadelphia to have the world-class transit system it deserves, it will have to stop designing transit facilities that tell its users, "Keep out." Where the money to do this will come from is another issue entirely.

In search of colonial Taipei: Zhongzheng District

Having endured 50 years of Japanese colonial rule from 1895 through 1945, Taiwan retains perhaps the most extensive collection of Japanese imperial-era architecture outside of Japan. To this day, many of Taiwan's national and local government institutions still operate out of the grand edifices built for Japan's colonial administration, including the iconic Presidential Office Building and the National Taiwan Museum, pictured above. These monuments of imperialism miraculously survived the nationalist anti-Japanese fervor that swept through Asia at the end of Japanese occupation and led to the destruction of most of their counterparts in China and Korea. Today, they are generally acknowledged as an integral part of Taiwan's architectural heritage.

Unsurprisingly, the strong European influence upon all levels of Japanese society during the imperial period made itself evident in its architectural practice as well. Quite naturally, the Japanese turned to European technology and design aesthetics for the construction of the grand bureaucratic monuments befitting a modern, nationalist state, of which they had no true domestic precedent. Consequently, most Japanese imperial architecture in Taiwan can be identified as variations on a number of architectural styles popular in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including French Second Empire, Gothic Revival, and Renaissance Revival.

Recently however, I have become more interested in the more everyday commercial architecture built during the colonial era - the two, three, and four-story buildings that once lined Taipei's old streets. The pictures in this post were taken around the Zhongzheng District (中正區), in the area between Taipei Main Station and the wide boulevards of Taiwan's government center, which was the city's commercial core for the first half the 20th century. Its colonial-era commercial rows, not built for air conditioning units, backlit commercial signage, or the density demanded by Taipei's post-war population boom, have been nearly entirely replaced after successive generations of rebuilding.

Unfortunately, most remaining colonial-era commercial structures in this part of town seem to have been especially neglected, and have been largely unaffected by the preservation efforts that have created "heritage streets" in other parts of the country. Those that do remain standing also seem to have been built closer to the middle of the century, as they have little of the Victorian, neo-Baroque flourish that Japanese colonial architecture is best known for. I even managed to find a rather rare specimen of Art Deco in the bunch:

Sadly, a good many of them have also been altered beyond recognition by unsympathetic renovations. In a most perverse and extreme case, this last building was literally sliced in half, and further suffered a drastic alteration to its first and second floor façades.

A brief introduction: my Taipei neighborhood

After a long journey, I've finally settled in back at home in Taiwan. And since it looks like I escaped the cold December rain in Philadelphia only to return to somewhat less cold December rain in Taipei, I thought I'd spend the morning beginning a long-delayed series of posts centered around my neighborhood here.

To begin with, the Taiwanese aren't nearly as into naming their neighborhoods as Americans are, and more often than not, place names don't get any more specific beyond administrative district boundaries. So I can tell you that I live in Neihu, but that's about as precise as saying that I live somewhere in South Philly. However, I could narrow it down a bit by calling my neighborhood the National Defense Medical Center area. Catchy and extremely marketable, I know. Interestingly, it happens to be one of the few parts of Taipei where one can easily find what can very well be described as rowhouses or townhouses, made possible by large expanses of vacant land that opened up for development in the 90s. Most of the area was entirely built up over the past decade, and as land prices have skyrocketed in recent years, new construction increasingly consists of higher-density towers.

Nonetheless, the neighborhood was built largely to satisfy middle and upper class demand for quieter, "surburban" living, and it shows. Much unlike the rest of the city, zoning prohibits any commercial development on all but major streets, and gated developments and street-facing garages are common. I'm well aware that these are highly antithetical to good, walkable urban design, but somehow they don't seem detract from my enjoyment of the neighborhood as much as one might expect them to. In general, I've noticed that many things that pose atrociously difficult obstacles to pedestrian life in North America have hardly any effect in Asia. Plus, the general lack of motor traffic in the neighborhood makes it one of the most bicycle-friendly parts of the city, a fact I am very thankful for.

Model Homes - 樣品屋

No matter how much one loves Taipei, it's nearly impossible to speak favorably about the architecture of most things built there since World War II, most of which can be summed up as being either soulless modernist apartment blocks or gaudy and equally unsightly post-modernist creations. Furthermore, it doesn't help that most non-office buildings are clad in dull ceramic tile to minimize the visible effects of pollution. Perhaps our architecture's greatest fault however, is its lack of originality or boldness. Building designs and layouts are shamelessly recycled (sometimes literally), and this is especially true of residential construction.

There are important and conspicuous exceptions however - they just don't stay around for very long. Taiwanese developers of residential construction have long had a somewhat wasteful habit of building elaborate model home and sales office complexes before tearing them down to replace them with the real thing. This is what these model homes tend to look like:


For as long as I can remember, model home designs have followed a starkly different aesthetic than the prevailing vernacular style. While permanent construction rejects clean white facades and glass walls, model homes never fail to embrace them. The playfulness of their volumes provide sharp contrast with the resolutely boxy towers that inevitably replace them. As a matter of fact, I have never come across a single real building built in "model home" style.


I've long thought that choice of architectural style is symbolic. For example it is a means through which corporations have projected images of themselves to the public - power through height and bulk, transparency and innovation through glass, and many other symbolisms. The same idea rings true for residential styles as well. What has always confused me then is the strange disconnect between the image that developers first present and the image of the final product. One seems to project innovation and creativity, while the other presents anything but. Nonetheless, it's apparently been a very successful model. I have always wondered whether this is a conscious decision, and if so, what in the world the philosophy behind it is.