City Awakening & Illegal Architecture with Roan Ching-Yueh

In this talk with the Te Whare Hēra artist in residence, Roan Ching-Yueh will share two of his curatorial projects in Taiwan that tested bottom-up design possibilities in modern Asian cities. Through these, he asks: what conventional cultural, social, moral and religious structures are we losing through the emergence of a global singular system? In which directions might a modern Taiwan city evolve, and can architects build from an angle closer to reality?

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Ching-Yueh Roan 阮慶岳 is an architect, curator, critic and writer based in Taipei. He received his MA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a licensed architect in both the United States and Taiwan. Between 1992-2002, he operated his own architecture office in Taipei, before moving into teaching, working as a Professor at Yuan-Ze University. He is an active architecture curator — including curating the Taiwan Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2006 — and is WEAK! together with Hsieh Ying-Chun and Marco Casagrande, operating an independent architectural research centre, Ruin Academy. He has been the recipient of a number of awards for his works, including receiving the Architectural Critic Award 2012 from the 3rd China Architectural Media Awards and Outstanding Taiwanese Architect of the Year 2015.

He is the author of more than 30 books that span novels, essay collections, and monographs on architecture. His novel Victory Song won the 2004 Taipei Literary Award, and The Boat over a Thousand Silver Waves was recently named in the 10 Best Books of 2023 in Taiwan.

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