A truly fresh start

Rounding a final hairpin turn as one enters the mountain hamlet of Tan'nan, deep in the backwoods of Nantou County, a bizarre sight emerges. Standing out amid the drab habitations is a building as eye-catching and odd as the Pompidou Center in Paris, although not as ugly. It's neither a high-tech research center, nor a fancy museum, but rather the local elementary school.

Tan'nan Elementary School was designed by Taichung-based architect Chiang Le-ching (姜樂靜) and recently won the prestigious Far Eastern Architecture Prize, but the school's principal is not quite certain over what he now presides -- a school or a futuristic monument to the 921 earthquake that brought down the former schoolhouse.

Last week, as he took in the school from the gravel running track that circles the building, principal Lee Min-sheng (李旻昇) said with a hint of resignation: "The kids are getting used to it. That's all I'm saying." For better or worse, principals, teachers and students in villages and towns throughout central Taiwan are being introduced to their new neighborhood schools as the buildings near completion after the earthquake of two years ago turned their old schools into heaps of rubble. What they are often finding where there once stood uninspiring concrete box-shaped buildings are sleek glass-and steel-structures that, in many cases, are quite challenging to the mainstream aesthetic, especially that of typically conservative small-town school administrators.

Something new

If there were to be a revolution in Taiwanese architecture, common sense would place it in Taipei, where the patrons with the deepest pockets and most avant-garde tastes are based and where the most renowned architects have their offices. Few would expect it to take place deep in the hills of Nantou and Taichung counties, but that, according to many in the field, is precisely what is happening.

"The 921 earthquake handed the current generation of Taiwanese architects a golden opportunity to completely reconsider and remake previously held notions surrounding public architecture," said Luo Shih-wei (羅時暐), head of the architecture department at Tunghai University and a panelist for the Far Eastern Architecture Prize.

When the 7.4-magnitude quake hit, it brought down schools in disproportionately high numbers, completely destroying 293 and damaging over 1,000. There was no great surprise, however, that so many schools practically disintegrated in the quake. A culture of shoddy design, lackadaisical construction practices and abundant kickbacks and skimming from allocated budgets were widely acknowledged and seen virtually as a way of life. Most people were simply grateful that the earthquake came in the middle of the night, when the children weren't at school, otherwise the quake's death toll would likely have been much higher than the 2,400 it killed.

"The previous government immediately realized that it was going to have to have to drastically change its practices in rebuilding the schools," said Yin Pao-ning (殷寶寧), assistant to the vice minister of education.

The sheer magnitude of the post-quake school reconstruction and the 49 private organizations and individual donors that offered assistance for the project meant that many of the decisions about contractors and architects would take place over the heads of local authorities. This, it was hoped, would circumvent the local buddy networks that allowed such substandard structures to be erected in the first place.