The government in February launched an online public design competition for a new national identification card. After it was announced last month, the winning design came under severe public criticism and the selection panel was enraged by the reaction.
The differences in opinion lie in focus. While netizens focused on national identity and the panel stressed design, the Ministry of the Interior never specified what the focus should be.
The winning design received only 46 votes online, while the design that received 97,498 votes was only given “the most popular” award. As the campaign was only to serve as a “reference point” for the card’s design, people said that perhaps they were just trying to keep themselves busy.
If the government really wanted to focus on design, it would have its hands full.
Taipei’s eastern area is a good example. More than 90 years ago, Germany developed a special urban design plan: Worried that roads would become blocked if everyone in skyscrapers came down at the same time, planners designed intersecting pedestrian overpasses five floors above ground to separate pedestrians from the high-speed traffic below, ensuring the safety of both.
Such designs have been realized in many bustling Japanese cities.
Years ago, I asked Taipei City Government officials if they had similar plans. They said yes and pointed to the numerous pedestrian overpasses connecting Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department stores and the Vieshow Cinemas Xinyi complex.
However, those overpasses were built by the businesses to keep customers in the shopping area, not by the city government.
In addition, there are no plans for even a single park in the area.
Admittedly, there is the park surrounding the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall at the end of Keelung Road, but that is not new, as it was Taipei Park No. 6 during the Japanese era.
Neither does Daan Forest Park (大安森林公園) look well designed. When construction began, a statue of Guanyin was preserved, so other religious groups asked for the same treatment, resulting in strong public protests.
By comparison, a team led by Frederick Olmsted, the father of US landscape architecture who was also responsible for the design of the Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls, won a competition for their design of New York City’s Central Park.
Olmsted took great pains in planning the sculptures in the park, which boasts a great variety of sculptures and monuments, including Cleopatra’s Needle, a bronze Alice in Wonderland statue and a Strawberry Fields section in memory of John Lennon, which provide an artistic getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city.
There used to be two sculptures in the Taipei Botanical Garden: a bronze bust of Urbain Faurie — a French missionary who traveled extensively around Taiwan collecting a large amount of plant samples before dying in Taipei in 1915 — and a monument to Bunzo Hayata, the father of Taiwanese botany. Both statues went missing after World War II.
It was not until 2016 that the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute started looking for the two statues ahead of the garden’s 120th anniversary. Only the plaster cast for Faurie’s bust was found, which was used to make a replica, while the Hayata statue had to be redesigned and reforged.
If the government started to do such things, that would be worthy of praise.
Lu Ching-fu is a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University’s Department of Applied Arts.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
They did it again. For the whole world to see: an image of a Taiwan flag crushed by an industrial press, and the horrifying warning that “it’s closer than you think.” All with the seal of authenticity that only a reputable international media outlet can give. The Economist turned what looks like a pastiche of a poster for a grim horror movie into a truth everyone can digest, accept, and use to support exactly the opinion China wants you to have: It is over and done, Taiwan is doomed. Four years after inaccurately naming Taiwan the most dangerous place on
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
RSS