A 31-story building is set to rise behind Longshan Temple (龍山寺) in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華).
The slab-like design of the building has been likened to a “cutting board.”
When people visit the historic temple in the future, they will be distracted by the architectural monstrosity looming behind it.
Additionally, if the residents of the new building were to hang their laundry out to dry on their balconies, it would be disrespectful to the gods of the temple.
A developer first proposed building a 15-story building behind the temple in 2013, but that was met with strong public opposition. After negotiations, the developer proposed lowering it to a 12-floor building and changing the color to white to lessen the impact.
Now the situation has gone from bad to worse.
The Taipei Department of Urban Development is trying to pass the buck to the Ministry of Culture by saying it would only make a decision after the ministry’s Cultural Heritage Review Committee reviews the plan.
However, cultural heritage reviews mainly focus on the protection of historic sites, and the surrounding environment is beyond the scope of site protection, not to mention that the department’s Urban Design Division, which is dedicated to managing such affairs, should handle the problem.
After the Taipei 101 skyscraper was completed in 2004, I asked Taipei officials if they had a strategy for handling conflicts between people and vehicles if more skyscrapers were to be built in the city.
They simply answered: “Sure we do. Haven’t you seen all the pedestrian skywalks in the Xinyi business district?”
Skywalks are built in commercial districts to attract customers, and are irrelevant to the matter I wanted addressed.
Since the establishment of the Urban Design Division’s Urban Design Review Committee, I have paid close attention to its performance because Taipei is in urgent need of urban design.
The city’s appearance today is perhaps even worse than it was during the Japanese colonial era, as one can see just by looking at Hengyang Road, Boai Road, Guanqian Road and the Dadaocheng (大稻埕) area.
The Japanese colonial era style has been imitated and preserved on some building facades along Hengyang Road. When Dadaocheng’s Chungho Textile Co’s colonial-era building was demolished for an urban renewal project, its facade was saved so that it can be placed on the new building upon completion.
In the past, the facades of all the buildings on Hengyang Road and Boai Road were planned simultaneously so the roads could reflect a cohesive colonial-era European style.
The committee is supposed to focus on design in Taipei’s eastern district, but no improvement has yet been observed, nor has any plan been proposed.
Although the city has a mechanism for managing the installation of billboards, it cannot think of original ideas that depart from Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) poor aesthetic taste.
This problem is not limited to Longshan Temple; it also includes other historic sites, such as the Baoan (保安宮) and Confucius Temple (孔廟).
Managing the development around such historical sites is the responsibility of the Urban Design Review Committee. It should stop waiting for the Ministry of Culture’s review and start facing up to that responsibility.
Lu Ching-fu is a professor in Fu Jen Catholic University’s department of applied arts.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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