Abstract

We can come up with a paradox that it is crucial for a certain region to allow a situation that will exclude foreigners and isolate itself from outside world to a certain degree for the sake of creating a unique architectural style that will be born only in the region.
Each region has its own distinctive climate and natural features, which affect the formation of architecture in some points. On the other hand the architectural style of a region is hugely influenced by the religion, culture and the way the culture’s existence, which are exclusive to the region.

In addition, a great individual (= a closed system) would greatly incorporate the historical context and contemporary features and propose universality that leads to the world while rep- resenting the natural features of a region.
It is said that no arches exist in the architecture of the Inca Empire. It is not fair, however, to simply think of it as not civilized one that was lack of information and technology from the standpoint of the Western culture because we can say that Machu Picchu is creative due to that reason.

In ancient times, the culture and civilization of Rome and China expanded as much as to cov- er almost the half of the world, becoming the origin of globalism in classical meaning; however, the wave of the Western culture did not reach Angkor Wat, Candi Borobudur as well as the Inca.

As the Germanic peoples invaded the north east part of Europe after the Ancient Rome was destroyed in the fifth century, the non Roman architecture such as gothic style from “the Goth” appeared as a new civilization in the Latin Empire including France that had been proud of being the descendant of Romans. However, Italia or Southern Europe would not want to fol- low such directions although gothic style had introduced new technologies such as building soaring spires.

The Western culture flowed in North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa (in other words, almost entire world except the West itself ) and dominated their natural features for about 400 years from the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus at the end of the 15th century until the 20th century came. The center of Rome had been moved to Istanbul and managed to survive for another 1,000 years until it was invaded by Saracen at last in the 15th century. The

Renaissance is believed to be the movement of reviving the Roman tradition that had been at the verge of being perished but managed barely to preserve by the creativeness of several geniuses while it was stoutly absorbing such advanced civilizations under the surface of such formidable foreign cultures as gothic or Saracen.

The Roman architecture was systematized in École nationale supérieure des beaux- arts, France and applied to the great renovation of Paris as the architectural language of Neo-Clas- sicism during the middle of the 19th century. Since then, the Neo-Classicism began losing its flexibility and, finally, came to an end from the inside of Europe. New technologies including reinforced concrete and steel-frame structure were incorporated and a new globalism called modernism has spread into the world via a number of unique and creative skills and means discovered in the early 20th century.

The current architectural civilization of the major cities in the world has been placed on the extension of such modernism and come to the present status leaving the issues of how to confront the matter of “natural features”. “Natural features” are like the old painting or original background remaining on a canvas when a painter is about to draw a new painting. Depend- ing on whether the painter draws a new painting considering them as pure white background or having conversation with the background by adding new shapes and colors based on the existing ones, it will result in pretty much different consequence. Some say that the contribu- tion and sin of the 20th century’s architecture are the destruction of natural environment, tra- ditional streets, etc; however, I presume that the common aspect of such faults would be the attempt itself to draw something on a “white” canvas rather than something that limited to the area of architecture.

However, the natural features, which are considered to have always been exposed to the risk of being destroyed by such globalism in terms of classical meaning, is thought that is in- compatible with globalism and could be the foundation of the pluralistic view that is regarded as the end of anti-globalism.

On the other hand, isn’t it also a narrow-minded way of thinking to simply denounce glo- balism as the destroyer of natural features? Due to this matter, the issue of “natural features”

could be taken into consideration and re-vitalized again paradoxically. If there is a locality that has been completely severed from the surroundings, it would be understood as the center of a small universe rather than being called locality.

Therefore, it is possible to build another hypothesis – “Globalism reminds us of natural features”. Perhaps, the answer will be the world where both exist together rather than a world where one of them has disappeared. It is likely to say that it resembles “an ocean and fish that live in the ocean”. In the ocean, there are several tidal currents as well as daily tides that occur globally due to the movement of the moon. The Kuroshio Current carries coral and plankton from the southern region and moves up all the way to the Korean Peninsula and Japan. In gen- eral, there are “oceanic fishes” such as oceanic bonitos or tuna fishes that live in such tides and have rather wide cruising radius; on the other hand, there are shore fishes that move within a range of 50 Km living under rocks. The former is global fishes while the latter is fishes living under natural features. Although these do not seem to have relationship, in fact, obvious rela- tionship between these two cases can be found, affecting each other via the food chain.

Whenever we mention [internationality] or [universality], it has been misunderstood to indicate “oceanic fishes” until now; however, as you can see if you go to a fish market, tuna fishes or sardines are not the only fishes that are traded in a market. There are shore fishes such as rock fish that can be found in any fish markets in the world such as fish markets in Greek, Pohang in Korea or Tsukiji in Japan. Although we may lose the global tides as a frog in the wall knows nothing about the great ocean if we completely shut ourselves in a region, it does not mean that an ability to move around the world widely and to adapt oneself to any place will automatically become the bases to create [universality]. Losing the capacity to see “natural fea- tures” can be equivalent to losing the root of the culture.

Given that natural features are not connected to nationalism in a narrow sense but contain the universality that connects to the world, the light leading to the future in the 21st century will begin shining from here.

Natural Features and Globalism

Both the natural environment and the city can be recognized as a patchwork of differ- ing elements and areas adjacent to each other. The resultant fragments and fields create a complex maze of boundaries and conflict. On the other hand, if we accept Structuralist ideals, the city can be regarded as a kind of “entire system” like the human body. Given such disparate interpretations, the way we go about recognizing the city must have much to do with our cognitive models. If we take the former model of the city and natural en- vironment as being made of conflict, then it can be said that human beings have used 3 methods of aleviating those stresses I here call “alienation”.

Alienation = discord: a situation created by the coexistence of two incompatible elements. Examples include discord in color, scale, angle, culture etc..

3 Methods of aleviating alienation:

Separation: ( e1, e2 ) -----> (e1 / e2 )
Refusing the adjacency of incomaptible elements. By putting up barriers or leaving a great distance between them they have no contact.

Assimilation: (e1, e2) -----> (e1, e1)
One or more element is forced to assume the identity of another element.

Mediation: (e1, e2) -----> (e1 /M/ e2)
Placing a mediator between 2 discordant elements. The presence of the mediator does not change the quality of either of the two elements in character or form. It is possible to have several kinds of mediators at once.

It may be said that this is just an extension of an analogy applied to human society. However, it can applied to the city and the natural environment where we regard them as a series of conflicting areas. From the example of putting up hedges between houses to the example of zoning theory the idea of separation emerges.

Examples of assimilation are clear when new buildings are expected to meet minimal expectations such as maintaining an eaves height similar to adjacent properties or to ad- here entirely to a set style. In assimilation there is always a kind of power at work. Whether it is economic, political or cultural it tends to force one of the components to follow the other. This is normally a method of preventing new situations of alienation from arising. However, in this there is the risk of creating another kind of alienation; one where the new destroys the parts of an otherwise harmonious patchwork.

Among the three methods, media- tion has the most promise in the mod- ern setting. It is more subtle and ver- satile in its application. Mediation has two categories, the physical and the semantic. Physical mediation is dem- onstrated in the balancing of difference between things like angle, shape, color, and scale. Semantic mediation occurs in clarifying differences of meaning and cultural.We should expect more devel- opment in the study of mediation concerning modern cities where physi- cal and cultural entropy increases con- stantly.

An example of mediation can be found in an analysis of cylindrical forms in plans of ancient Rome. Hadrians Villa, although not a city itself, has a quality of organization similar to that of a Ro- man City (See fig. 1). It is composed of differing angular systems. One group follows an axial system while others are angular. Where the two collide the composition becomes a series of sev- eral angular fragments. At any specific point of meeting there always appears a round architectural type as a physi- cal mediator between the opposing angles. These round types enable the coexistence of many different angles to function as a system or patchwork.

In Constantinopolis on the other hand, there is another round type; one which acts at all times as a center point where many axis meet (See fig. 2). Under the rule of Constantinous Constantinopolis became the first Christian City. Here, the round element began to play a more sacred role operating as a unique center integrating the whole city through centralization as a compositional tool.

Historically, before Constantinopolis, round form was typically used as a mediator aleviat- ing potential physical conflict between disagreeing compositional forces.

Interestingly, afterward, round type as a physical mediator was rapidly replaced by round type as center point. From the change in ideology, I could interpret the parallel change in the physi- cal meaning of round type.

The city as well as the natural environment is full of conflicts created on the boundaries between different patchworks. Yet these conflicts evoke the emergence of the new related- ness between alienated fields. Even in the topics of Form and Function, we are now entering the new era of “Form and Function are mediated”. From the word “Form follows Function” that represents the begining of the 20th century.
I believe that as “mediation” is the only notion of today that could regard all those conflicts a positive energy to turn a harsh chaos into a more fruitful multiplicity.

Sun Moon Lake Administration office of Tourism Bureau
—A landform for dialog between the human being and nature

This is one of the projects from an international competition held in Taiwan in 2003 for four representative sightseeing locations in Taiwan called the Landform Series. It is a project for an environment management bureau that houses a visitor center in the Sun Moon Lake Hsiangshan area.

The site just touches the narrow inlet extending almost south-north at its northern tip, has a narrow opening facing the lake-view direction, and extends relatively deep inland along a road. Looking towards the lake, the lake surface looks like it is cutout in a V shape as mountain slopes close in from both sides. That is, although the site is for the Sun Moon Lake Scenery management bureau, it doesn’t have a 180° view of Sun Moon Lake as can be enjoyed from the windows and terraces of the hotels standing on a typically popular site. In most cases with sites like this, the building is positioned on the lake side to secure the greatest view possible, and thus the inland side tends to become a kind of dead space. As the basic policy for the design, my first aim was to propose a new model for a relationship between the building and

its natural environment while preserving the surrounding scenery and keeping the inland area from becoming dead space.

My second priority was to address the disadvantages of the site whose view of the Sun Moon Lake is not necessarily perfect, and to draw out and amplify the potential advantages. `One way to solve the first problem was to pursue a new relationship between the building and its surrounding landform. Since long ago, buildings have generally been built “on” landforms, but there have been cases in which they have been built within landforms, such as the early Catho- lic monasteries of Cappadocia and the Yao Tong settlements along the Yellow River, and there have also been such classics as Nolli’s map that considered the building as the ground which can be curved or transformed, similarly to the landform, in a conceptual sense. Due to the fact early modernism negated in totality the methods of self-transformation—including the poche method that belonged to pre-19th century neoclassicism in particular—and demonstrated an inability to adapt to the complex and diverse topography in such areas as east Asia, I believe that 20th century architecture actually gave rise to the phenomenon of land development projects that “flattened” mountains, an approach that is almost synonymous with the destruc- tion of nature.

In fact, the very key to li s each, to create a sense of dynamism that leads to the lake sur- face. Moreover, I set up a near-view water basin in contrast with the distant-view lake surface to enhance the water surface effect by mirroring the distant view upon it. The fact it is only possible to view the lake surface distantly from a relatively narrow angle means that the site— fortunately free of nearby buildings—is surrounded 360° by a lush sea of trees. I saw this as the second undulating surface and opened up the upper part of the building by greening it to create continuity with the natural surroundings. These two surfaces—the union of the lake and water basin surfaces, and the resonance of the building’s greenery on the upper part with the surrounding undulating sea of trees—are connected via the tunnel-shaped diagonal path that cuts and penetrates through the interior of the building, and through the slopes carved into the building like mountain paths, to create a multitiered landform.

This half-architectural and half-landform project is conceptualized as a stage setting to bring out and amplify a hidden dimension of the scenery and environment of Sun Moon Lake, and at the same time create a new dialogue between the human being and nature that provides another new dimension to this area.