Huang Sheng-yuan: Treating Yilan as a City Under Slow Repair, Building Architecture Without Walls

30-second overview: In 1994, Taipei-born Huang Sheng-yuan relocated his office to Yuanshan, Yilan, and spent the next thirty years doing one thing: treating the entire city as a slowly evolving construction site. His "vascular bundle plan" removed walls and reopened buried moats, erasing clear boundaries between public buildings and streets. In 2017, Fieldoffice became the first Taiwanese architecture team invited to tour Europe, and Huang himself received Japan's Yoshizaka Takamasa Prize that same year—the first time it was awarded to a foreigner.

Keywords: Huang Sheng-yuan, Fieldoffice, Yilan, Vascular Bundle Plan, Luodong Cultural Workshop

An Alley Called Back to Its Name

In the northwest corner of old Yilan City, there is an alley now called Guangda Lane. This name had disappeared; Fieldoffice recovered the old place name during renovation and won residents' agreement to use it again.¹

The renovation of that alley did not begin with a complete design drawing. The team carried large models door-to-door to explain the project, negotiating with each household, treating even seemingly trivial problems like "how water pools at the doorway" as design challenges.¹ This reversed the usual approach to public works: typically, there is a budget and drawings first, then residents are asked to understand them. Fieldoffice took another path—first showing people their own front doors on the drawings, then revising the plans accordingly.

There is an even smaller work on the Yilan River. The Jinmei Boardwalk is not a newly built bridge but a pedestrian footbridge attached to the side of the original Qinghe Bridge, which carried only vehicle traffic. It was completed with a lightweight structure and minimal budget in 2008.¹² The design intent Fieldoffice wrote down at the time was just two lines: "A narrower path makes people meet. Dimmer lights let birds rest."²

1994: A Taipei Native Moves to Yuanshan

Huang Sheng-yuan was born in Taipei in 1963, graduated from Tunghai University's Department of Architecture, then studied abroad, earning a master's degree in architecture from Yale University in 1991. He worked and taught in Los Angeles and at North Carolina State University before returning to Taiwan in 1993 and establishing his office in Yuanshan, Yilan in 1994. In 2005, it was renamed Fieldoffice Architects.¹

The term "Fieldoffice" (田中央) first appeared publicly in 2004. That year, the old city waterfront living corridor on the Yilan River won the Taiwan Architecture Award. The office's accountant published acceptance remarks in the magazine Architect, using this Taiwanese expression, and it became fixed thereafter.¹

From 1994 onward, he has spent thirty years in Yilan. The National Culture and Arts Foundation's citation for his award captured this in one sentence: "Architecture is local social practice."¹

Vascular Bundle: Treating the City as a Living Organism

His most famous methodology is called the "vascular bundle." The term borrows from botany, referring to the channels that transport nutrients. Applied to the city, it means reopening water paths and pedestrian routes that have been blocked by walls or buried under pavement, allowing public space to grow back like living tissue.¹

The first vascular bundle began in 1995. While designing the Yilan County Social Welfare Center, the more he understood the landscape texture of Yilan, the more he realized that new construction would cause irreversible damage to the neighboring Ewang community. No one commissioned him to address this; he nonetheless devised a series of action plans, including reconnecting the community to the Yilan River across the fast road and levee that had severed them. These plans eventually coalesced into the "First Vascular Bundle," roughly 560 meters long, which took thirteen years to fully complete.¹

The second began in 2004 centered on the old South City Road, spanning 1.4 kilometers with more than a dozen action plans already completed; the third started in 2009.¹ In 2013, the Vascular Bundle Plan won first place in the gold category of the United Nations Livable Cities Competition.¹

Luodong Cultural Workshop: Fourteen Years and 114 Meters

The Luodong Cultural Workshop is his most famous work and also the most time-consuming. Planning and design began in 1999; it was completed in 2012—spanning two changes of government, three county magistrates, and seven cultural bureau directors.¹²

What finally emerged was a flat steel canopy 114 meters long, lightly dividing the sky. Standing beneath it and looking up, one recalls Luodong's history of timber industry origins, like glimpsing driftwood floating past from underwater.² The county government originally wanted to include a basketball court and running track; Fieldoffice left the middle section open. Huang's statement at the time was: "We claim the right to occupy space that need never be occupied by anyone—culture should not be controlled by any government."²

Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, after visiting the site, offered a contrastive assessment: "The longer you stay in Toyo Ito's buildings, the more uncomfortable you become; the longer you stay in Huang Sheng-yuan's buildings, the more comfortable you become. The Luodong Cultural Workshop proves that space without a specific purpose has greater vitality."²

Sakura Memorial Park: Architecture Designed to Disappear

Sakura Memorial Park in Yuanshan, Yilan, was his boldest experiment at age fifty. The entrance bridge, with its rough texture, spans a valley; its highest point is a green lawn and a blank stone monument, beneath which Chiang Wei-shui is buried.²

There is no epitaph, only a short passage from Chiang Wei-shui's "Clinical Lectures" embedded in a low stone wall at one end, discussing "the highest physician heals the nation." When leading visitors there, he often says: "After thirty years, these places will be covered by grass; while they exist, we should already know how they will disappear."² In 2010, Sakura Memorial Park received the World Architecture magazine's Best Building of the Year award.¹

2017: European Tour and the Yoshizaka Takamasa Prize

Beginning in late 2016, Fieldoffice toured Europe with its works, starting at the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, then moving to Estonia, Lithuania, Ostrava and Prague in the Czech Republic, and the Paris Architecture Center. This was the first time a Taiwanese architecture team was invited to tour Europe.¹²

In September 2017, Huang and Fieldoffice received the fourth Yoshizaka Takamasa Prize from Japan, the first time it was awarded to a foreigner. The jury's citation praised them for "evoking connection between people, with people in turn catalyzing the completion of architecture."³ The prize, established in 1972 by the Japan Living Design Association, honors the late Takamasa Yoshizaka, a Waseda University architecture professor and former president of the Japan Architectural Association. The award is not limited to architecture; previous recipients have included writers and dancers.³

That same year, he became one of the recipients of the 20th National Award for Arts.¹

Why Yilan

Investing thirty years in the same piece of land yields accumulation. Fieldoffice has completed over fifty works, the vast majority of which are public buildings and public spaces freely accessible to the general public, scattered across the Yilan plain.¹

The common thread in these works is not style but time: the Luodong Cultural Workshop fourteen years, the old city waterfront living corridor thirteen years, the Yuanshan Machine Fort eleven years.² For an architecture office, this pace is unusual in Taiwan's public works environment, and it explains why "slow repair" is written as his methodology rather than merely a descriptor.

After seeing the works in 2018, Pallasmaa said that compared to any other architect he knows, Huang Sheng-yuan most expands the architect's role: in the West, architects are reduced to a profession, waiting in offices for clients; Huang Sheng-yuan crosses that boundary, persuading officials, residents, clients, and financiers, intervening in local life through projects large and small.²

Further reading:

• Taiwan Architecture — The full context from Paiwan slate houses to contemporary public architecture
• Jimmy Liao — Another creator who left a public art landscape in Yilan
• Yilan County — The political, industrial, and social background of this plain

References