Seeking Roots With The Ghosts | Cheng Chieh Li

Nature is a place where people can escape from city and taking a deep breath. Culture is the faith of a place and people lived within it with harmony, they’re inseparable.

First Award | RTFA 2017 Awards
Category: Cultural (Concept)

Participant  Name: Cheng Chieh  Li
Country: Taiwan

©Cheng Chieh Li

However, we human beings are always making orders in god’s perspective and creating destruction toward planet earth, making nature and city imbalanced. As one can see, in a long section of Toucheng, there are natural landscapes such as mountains, lands and ocean that connect not only itself but also a strong relation with local inhabitants. However, such harmony had gone for a long time. Ocean eventually became reclaimed land with newly planned roads. The familiar salt in wind faded, left with smell of concrete only. Believed in Architecture should be a place based on both human and environment, I then consider a possibility of “Landscape as Urbanism” , trying to record place experience in a chaos of spiritless and cultural loss under excessive development. With design methods of sawing lands and cultural axis of past, recreating the memory of vanishing past.

Serving the oldest city of Yilan, Wushih port has been an important commercial harbor since 1826.However, a big flood in 1878 had caused the port to silt up, and in 1883, an American streamer was aground, making the harbor non-functional and abandoned completely in 1892. Through time, the silted up zone has become a wetland, providing home to a diverse ecosystem. However, in 2012, the government sold the wetland to developers for residential use.

©Cheng Chieh Li

The once prosperous rice field and rich vernacular culture have been commoditized by the developers as selling points, discounting the fact that local farmers and  fishermen are actually driven away by the rising property values from their habitats, often left without money or skills to survive.

I want to protect my memory of hometown.
The base is the last natural area on this wetland. I attempt to preserve it and connect with the significant events of Toucheng. The festival is the core concept of the base. It is endowed with meanings of remembering the memory about this place and recovering the original.

©Cheng Chieh Li

A contemporary museum” is a place lock the culture in the window box ,the culture is like the animals in the zoo. But culture is our daily life , isn’t it? Our living place is our culture claim , which is called “ Civic Museum”. The Civic Museum should included a market and festival, which cohesion everyone’s daily life. A market is a place not just for trading , but for communicating. The culture value is created by interacting among people, which can shorten their distance. It’s become a place to celebrating when the Festival. The route itself conveys our respection to religion, it provide outsiders to understand local culture by participate it, so they can have identification to the culture.