Students trade views on the city we live in

By Ian Bartholomew
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 16, 2001, Page 24

Shown above is a display of Deniz Sun's project titled Ambiguous Thresholds on view at IT Park. GRAPHIC COURTESY OF IT PARL

Taipei residents are famous for their complaints about the city's traffic, its ugly buildings and its general chaos. Fresh eyes provide a fresh perspective, and in the case of the group of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) architecture students, this perspective is being put on show at an exhibition at IT park this week.

"The thing about architecture students is that they are almost obsessive observers of their environment," said Sand Helsel, an associate lecturer at the RMIT School of Architecture and Design. These observations have been put down on paper in many forms: photographs, renderings, architectural drawings, sketches, maps and blueprints.

The RMIT students are working together with students from Taiwan's Tamkang University (淡江大學) in a studio environment designed to promote the exchange of ideas and expand each other's perceptions of the urban environment.

Huang Chiao-ying (黃巧穎), one of the local students taking part in the project, said that at first she had been skeptical as to what the visiting students from abroad could offer, but said that later she began to see familiar things in different terms.

Visitors to IT Park are invited to look through the projects that offer differing views of Taipei. PHOTO COURTESY OF IT PARK

Huang said that the interaction had opened her eyes to the potential of things she had taken for granted.

One of the RMIT students, Suzannah Waldron, said: "I would be fascinated by a stall or something, and [the local student] would be thinking, `This is just the place I buy noodles.'" Waldren looked at the fringe world that exists under Taipei's many bridges, seeing how these marginal spaces have mutated into accommodation for the city's homeless.

"I would be fascinated by a stall or something, and [the local student] would be thinking, `This is just the place I buy noodles.'"

Suzannah Waldron, a visiting student from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

From here, by looking at how these spaces in bridge support systems and against dikes have mutated to form systems of storage and support, she suggests a "generic way of speculative programming of the margin" -- in other words, how the peripheral is put to practical use.

Waldron's is only one of 23 projects presented by the 33 students involved in the program which looks at virtually every aspect of life in this frenzied metropolis: divisions between public and private space, garbage and recycling, the reuse of space at night and during the day.

There is food for thought for almost anyone who thinks about the city as a living entity. Coming to terms with the rapidly shifting urban landscape was a new experience for the Australian students, but also provided valuable insight. Peter Ryan, whose project sees Taipei as "a flexible system capable of ... actively organizing itself into new structures and forms," said that he likes the way people in Taiwan built around available space rather than imposing a design from above.

The desire not to impose a fixed form extends to the exhibition itself. Each project is presented through a number of picture plates that are stacked on a central table on the third floor of the IT Park exhibition space. The walls have grids of velcro to which the plates can be attached. Every day, a single project will be displayed in its entirety, but the other projects will be available for display under a number of different themes. Visitors to the exhibition are free to rearrange, add or remove plates from the walls, so they can find new juxtapositions of images and ideas. Video footage about how the exhibition changes from day to day will be taken, giving a further level to the work the students have created.

The results of the workshop will be featured at the 1st International Architecture Biennial in the Netherlands next year.

What: Mobility: Taipei Operations WHO RMIT and Tamkang University
Where: IT Park, 2F, 41 Yitung St., Taipei (台北市伊通街41號 2樓), Hsimen MRT Station
When: Sept. 15 - Sept. 21, 1pm to 9pm