During the recent processes changing Taiwan economically from a developing country to a developed one, a lot of human intervention had been made along the island coast which is considered to be the major factors on recent degradation of coastal wildlife, commercial fishing and aquaculture revenue and quality of living throughout coastal areas. This project seeks to propose a developmental strategy composed of a set of logics that will guide the growth of new reef and wetlands and foster the production of integrated, not fragmented, programme along the coast. The primary goal of the project is to produce a design method that can be used in the genesis of new and integrated man-made and natural systems along the coast.

Second Award |  RTFA 2014 Awards
Category: Landscape Concept

©Shu Chung Yao

In recent years, the traditional infrastructures such as dike and wave block were proved increasing coastal current. The dam construction dwindle the amount of sand drift and causes the lost of sandbank and land subsidence which engender direct impact to Taiwan’s coast interface and threaten the resident’s livelihood in the future. Therefore, the rethinking of the extreme environmental conditions to propose a new system of defense, aquaculture and livelihood in southwestern Taiwan become urgent.

This project aims at re-structuring the relationship between nature and human of coast interface of Chiayi by analyzing a new material “Biorock” which has been testing in Coral Reef Alliance USA. Biorock is combined with CaCO3 which can reach 816 kg/cm3 extrusion stress and become the habitat of nature species. A new system which includes new defense, aquaculture and livelihood modes to face diverse environmental issues in the future will therefore be proposed.

About defense mode, the traditional concrete dunk will be transformed into biodiversity interface which includes reef system to defense the seawater impact when the sandbank sunk under the average sea level and nourish and form a habitat composed of beach, biorock and wetlands. The seawater impact will be reduced not in one layer of concrete interface but in multi-layers of nature elements.

About aquaculture mode, instead of nurturing the same species in the same ponds, a new idea of aquaculture which inserts and nurtures the diverse but specific species will be proposed and a more complete ecosystem will gradually be constructed. About livelihood mode, the ruined dwelling space will be reused for fostering the fry to support the new aquaculture and the town scheme will be re-planned by reconnecting the relationship between land and coast space.
In this project , Taiwan’s coast environment issues will be addressed, a sustainable strategy for the future development will be proposed, and a new vision about the future life will be reconfigured.