Yilan [18]

This summer, my travels around Taiwan were pretty limited. Normally I would visit relatives all over, but this time I never made it down south.

Yilan, although only half an hour outside of Taipei, was probably one of my larger trips. A couple of my coworkers took me there to look at some architect by a well known Taiwanese architect, whose name I have written down but cannot read...

This first building is a gallery building that is still under construction. The concept was to give the essence of driftwood floating in and under the surface of the water. The park behind was designed by the same firm as well:

slides:

The second building was some sort of small commemorative museum. It wasn't open, but look at that 'folded' concrete, something that maybe too many architects get excited about. I like it too. The roof of the room the left folds down and becomes a bench which doubles as a shade for the windows below:

This was the architect taking the typology of local buildings and stacking them on top of each other to form a community center sort of space:

The second floor directly connected to a bridge going off away from the building. The material of the path didn't change so you never got a sense that you were leaving the building until you were already further away. There were a lot of little nooks to sit and look out over the landscape:

The bridge used to be only for cars, but the architects added a pedestrian walkway off to the side and slightly under the existing bridge. It used the structure of the existing bridge.

For being by a roadway, the pedestrian bridge was peaceful. Probably because it was lower in level. So much nicer than sidewalks on bridges right next to the cars that I am used to.:

Rowing machines looking over the river:

Realizing that quirked out form is hard to read. i don't get it.

Last was a trip to another much larger museum. The concept was of a rock sitting in the water. The water around is manmade, but the ocean was right across the street: