The southern city area of historical Taipei is where many governmental organizations are located since the Japanese occupation period. The urban organization has a distinct hierarchy and energy, but its autonomy has destructed the continuity of urban spaces. The large and inward architectural language in this area no longer serves the contemporary social relations, such as interdisciplinarity, pluralism, cultural exchanges, and innovating development.
“2016 Urban Floating Islands” attempts to place three drifting "architecture" that are able to move, grow, and gather into the urban gaps of of the southern city wall area. The states of Urban Floating Islands respond and intervene with their architectural surroundings to transform the selected urban gaps into villages, stages, schools, and theaters.
These three Urban Floating Islands returned to the starting point of architectural ideology to instigate the the loss of physical senses when living in an urban environment. By recalling physicality, architectural element such as ‘window’, ‘roof’ and ‘wall’ are given new meanings to combine with artistic activities in the community and becoming "Family Story House", "Art Exhibition Hall" and "Photography Time Machine", each are the new "conjunctions" of the city where energy gathers.
The creative team intends to develop an architectural scale that is able to drift and change between the body, the city, and the landscape. These conjunctions are not trying to connect the city with its memories but to construct a bizarre and even morbid urban landscape to discuss the tension and vitality of time and materiality. They form an investigation into the deeply-buried energy of its contemporary urban surroundings and inquire the possibility of an alternative field of art making.