Tunghai University’s Luce Memorial Chapel and Taichung City Hall are to be listed as national historical buildings by the Ministry of Culture, the Taichung Department of Cultural Heritage said.
Applications to review the designations of the buildings were filed by the university and the Taichung City Government.
However, the university’s request that its bell tower be listed as a national historical building was rejected, the department said.
Photo: Su Meng-chuan, Taipei Times
The ministry is to publish its decision in the next few days, it said.
Completed in 1963, Luce Chapel was designed by architects I.M. Pei (貝聿銘) and Chen Chi-kwan (陳其寬), the department said.
With structural engineer Feng Hou-san (鳳後三) and construction manager Wu Ken-tsung (吳艮宗), they completed a classic work of post-World War II architecture that perfectly blended global trends in design with the local environment, the department said.
During the post-war recovery, when materials were scarce, the chapel offered an exciting yet subdued interpretation of Modernism, it said.
Taichung City Hall was one of five major prefectural halls constructed during the Japanese colonial era. It was the work of architect Matsunosuke Moriyama, as were the halls in Taipei and Tainan, which are now the Control Yuan building and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature respectively, it said.
The office of the then-Taiwan governor-general’s civil affairs department oversaw construction of Taichung City Hall, which was built in stages from 1913 to 1934, the department said.
The building contains elements of Neoclassicism, as well as architectural styles from the German empire, it said.
It features triangular gables on its towers, a mansard roof, roof windows in various styles and many decorations on its facade, it said.
Luce Chapel and Taichung City Hall are to become Taichung’s third and fourth national monuments, after the classifications of the Wufeng Lin Family Mansion and Garden and Taichung Railway Station, the department said.
Restoration of the chapel is to be completed in line with Bureau of Cultural Heritage regulations, which require at least 5 percent of funding for such projects to be provided by the owner, user or manager of a privately held national monument, it said.
The bureau can provide the remainder, it said.
Subsidized by the ministry, restoration and repurposing of Taichung City Hall is already under way, it said.
After the work is completed, the city could ask the ministry for up to 65 percent of the funding required to manage and maintain the building, it said.
Subsidies from the central government would facilitate not only the preservation and maintenance of the newly designated national monuments, but also their transformation into important cultural sites in the city, it added.
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