Building on buildings

If you’ve ever rented a rooftop apartment in Taiwan, chances are your landlord was breaking the law — many of the structures are illegal.

For curator and architect Roan Ching-yueh (阮慶岳), these illegal rooftop apartments are the site of a struggle between the average citizen on the one side and the government, developers and architects on the other. This tension lies at the heart of Illegal Architecture (朗讀違章), an exhibit of documents and installations that examines the architecture and architectural practices of Taiwan’s Hsieh Ying-chun (謝英俊) and China’s Wang Shu (王澍).

“The design of most modern cities is top-down. The interesting thing about the development of Asian cities is that it is bottom up. It is very organic,” Roan told the Taipei Times over coffee at the trendy UrbanCore Cafe and Bookshelf, which is located in the same part of a drab cement building as UrbanCore Gallery, where the exhibit’s documents are located.

“But the Taipei government has been trying to change that, trying to control everything with order,” he said. “I think it is really scary. But I think we can learn from unregulated architecture. It is something we should be proud of.”

Roan’s solution isn’t to build more illegal structures, but to involve residents and local architects in the modification of existing ones.

“For example, the rooftops for the whole block, you could build a bridge linking them and an elevator from ground level up. You can create another layer in the city,” he said.

Roan cited two books that inspired the current show and informed his own thinking about architecture since he gave up his practice a decade ago to pursue teaching, writing and curating.

The first, The Hidden Order: Tokyo Through the Twentieth Century by Yoshinobu Ashihara, presents a picture of Tokyo that challenged architectural orthodoxy at the time of its publication in 1989.

“Before 1989, the thinking went that Asian cities were behind [architecturally],” Roan said. “But his book showed that Asian cities have an order — but it is a hidden order.”

Taken as a whole, Tokyo — and indeed Taipei — might appear chaotic, but order emerges, Roan said, when we examine the organic nature of how buildings develop in Asian cities.

The second and perhaps more revolutionary book to influence Roan was Made in Tokyo, a somewhat eccentric work that is part guidebook, part rumination on Tokyo’s architecture.

Published in 2001, it launched an assault on the rarefied presumptions of the architecture industry as seen through magazines, which generally focus on single structures by well-known architects.

“The architecture you see in these magazines is a lie because you rarely see it in ordinary life. It is architecture that is detached from reality,” Roan said.

Made in Tokyo broadened Roan’s ideas about architecture’s potential because it focused on the often overlooked functional buildings and tiny structures that make up the majority of Tokyo’s urban environment.

Illegal Architecture merges these two strands of thought and presents Asian cities as possessing their own internal logic of organically created local architecture, which is favored over bureaucratically sanctioned and developer-imposed ideals.

For Roan, Hsieh and Wang’s work exemplifies architecture that takes communities into account and is organic, practical and sustainable.