"I realized after I finished writing it that it wasn't done," Roan said. "I'd introduced male characters later in the book that never had a chance to speak." And so his first novel would become a trilogy, the second book of which Kaixuan Gao Ge (凱旋高歌), or song of triumphant return, was published later that year and received the Taipei City Culture Award. The third installment is due to be published later this year. Several other volumes, including Queer Space: Cha cha cha have established him as not only a talented writer, but a prolific one as well.
But despite his love of literature, the foundations he laid as an architect have never been far behind him. In fact, as an associate professor in the architecture department of Shih Chien University, his syllabus requires students to write their thoughts on a work of literature of their choice -- an exercise Roan believes will liberate the creative aspects of their design work and force in his students a dialogue of their own between literature and architecture.
"Students spend the majority of their time in the design studio and there are great demands on them there," he said. "But if they're going in to the studio not knowing what they want to come out with, their designs will not be what they could be." It's important, he said, that students of architecture know where they come from and who they are for their work to surpass utilitarian standards. Architects, in his opinion, can do with public space what writers do with words.
"We [architects] need to look at literature in order to see how that art form has evolved," he said. "It has accomplished something that architecture has not yet. ... There is too much compromise in architecture. Literature has been able to express what's inside us."
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