The site located at the riverside of Ming-Chih River, Chaozhou Town, PingTung, where having a terrific sight view. The river passes through Chaozhou Town and was the living and leisure center for the neighborhood around at the past. Recently the local government tries aggressively to develop an eco-friendly riverside environment and enhance the importance of Ming-Chih River to the neighborhood. Therefore, to re-emphasis the river and making the residents to see the precious riverside in urban context is one of the important issues in this project.
According to the spatial design, we believe overmuch open sight view will not only make people unable to enjoy the view but also uneasy to observe it, appropriate shadings or framings will induce the curiosity and concentration to outdoor world instead. For this reason, we designed an openable interface system at the exterior wall, when it is closed, it looks like a curtain floating outside the wall, lighting pass through the interface reflects indoor space, people start to be curious about the outdoor view by the lighting effect. When it is opened, people can fully observe the outside view, which creates a blurry but finally wide open visual impression. By doing so, we hope people re-observe Ming-Chih river, re-possess Ming-Chih river.
Also, the architectural layout of this project is a typical urban street house layout in Taiwan Urban Context. Long-side wall of the street houses built adjacent to each other and make the short-side wall facing the view or front façade. This kind of urban building layout not only loses the relaxing element of the living nature, but also lack of human privacy in this dense urban environment. Therefore we tried to re-define the party walls, keep the structural behavior and functional purpose of the party walls, and also input design concepts to the party walls, make them important architectural elements to create the atmosphere. For instance, we extend out the party walls to outside, so the short-side of the street houses can have fully privacy and comfort zone for balcony activities and sight viewing. The tilted shape of the party walls are also an impression of the local environmental surroundings of Chaozhou Town. We hope this attend can successfully create a true usable architectural space for urban context, and also connects history, environment, and local memories.