By all rights, Roan Ching-yueh (
literature.
Rather than forsake the craft on which he was once singularly focused, he has made his personal journey public in several books on architecture and its relationship to literature. In penning his protestations of Taiwan's current architectural milieu, he has offered his thoughts on an industry whose artistic roots, he says, have
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
withered.
"Chinese architecture has lost its connection with the real culture," he said, complaining that today's practicing architects are largely trained in the West, steeped in postmodernism and the Bauhaus tradition, and are producing work that bears little resemblance to that of even a generation ago.
What's more, he said, the restrictions placed on architects by the developers who hire them, and the compromises they must make, often lead to buildings and works in which public interest is secondary to financial interest.
For Roan, the solution was to abandon the trade in favor of finding a personal voice and artistic integrity he felt he'd lost. His decision was based in part on setbacks his firm had encountered; namely, the scrapping of a proposed artists' village in Nantou County that was to be the focus of his own artistic interests for years to come. Another project, the Nankang Public High School, was built, only to be flooded by Hurricane Nina the following year.
"I'd been invited in 2001 to participate in an artist exchange in Honduras in my capacity as a writer," he said. "At the time my firm had several employees and I felt responsible for them. But I arranged to go for three months and discovered while I was away that the world kept moving without me. It was very liberating." He returned from Honduras, closed his firm, took a job teaching architecture at a local university and began focusing on his writing.
Storytelling was nothing new to him. While still studying in Chicago, he penned several short stories about his experiences in America that were published as an anthology in Taiwan. He wrote a second anthology of short stories, Kooqi Kooqi Cheng (哭泣哭泣城), upon his return to Taiwan.
"I wanted to find a new voice in my writing," he said. "So I picked up a map of Taipei City and County, looked at some of the names, and used 10 of them to write stories based on those names." Other titles followed, most informed by his design work. Mountains Beyond the Door, a Dialogue Between Literature and Architecture (開門見山色) and Displaced Moments, Ruins, Remnants. Literature (惚恍) gained him recognition as an architect with a penchant for prose, but it was Roan's first novels that earned him praise as a writer of fiction. Lin Shou-zi Yi Jia (林秀子一家), the story of a woman who keeps a neighborhood temple, was written at his kitchen table and inspired by a small temple visible out his window. Asia Weekly (亞州週刊) magazine listed it as one of the 10 best Chinese books of last year, a list that included works of both fiction and non-fiction. Only one other book from Taiwan received a mention.
"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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