Taiwan Today

This has been quite a year for Wang Da-hong (王大閎). A top-notch though rather reticent architect, Wang may have closed the doors on his architectural firm and formally retired 17 years ago, but he has not been forgotten. In December 2013, the Society for Research and Preservation of Wang Da-hong’s Architecture was founded, and in early January this year Taipei City Government officials met with the nongovernmental organization at a ceremony marking the launch of their joint effort to recreate the architect’s first home in Taiwan.

The one-story house was designed by the architect and built on a site along Jianguo South Road in Taipei in 1953. It was sold in 1963 and torn down a number of years later. “It was perhaps the first Western-style work with Chinese features to garner high acclaim in Taiwan,” Shyu Ming-song (徐明松), secretary general of the society, says regarding the significance of the reconstruction project.

The project is slated for completion by the end of this year. The replica of Wang’s house is to be built on land provided by the city government in the Taipei Art Park adjacent to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

In February this year Wang received the National Cultural Award, which honors Taiwan’s artists and is funded by a grant from the Republic of China (ROC) government. He also won the National Award for Arts in 2009. Shyu, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Ming Chuan University in Taipei, feels these honors are long overdue. “He’s such an important figure in Taiwan’s architecture,” Shyu says. Wang was already semi-retired when Shyu studied under him as a college student in the 1980s, and the academic began conducting much more comprehensive research on his former teacher in 2006.

For the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Award-winning mainland Chinese architect Wang Shu (王澍), Wang Da-hong is the architect in Taiwan that he most admires, Shyu says. It is esteem of this nature that Shyu believes will draw crowds to the first-ever exhibition of Wang Da-hong’s work in mainland China, where the Ming Chuan teacher is co-organizing events showing the architech’s works at five well-known colleges and universities later this year.

Wang Da-hong, now 97, had been a star in the architecture community long before the limelight found him again this year. That popularity can be seen in the number of houses he designed in a secluded mountain-side community in northern Taipei. He is best known, however, for public works in Taipei such as the National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and buildings on the National Taiwan University campus. In fact, the vast majority of Wang Da-hong’s more than 100 projects are located in Taipei.

Some designs have never been built but remain an integral part of the architect’s portfolio. One such design is his blueprint for the National Palace Museum (NPM), which was deemed inappropriately “progressive” at the time by conservative elements within the higher echelons of government. Another project that never saw the light of day was intended for Houston, Texas as a gift from the ROC to commemorate the first-ever moon landing in 1969. The design, titled A Monument to the Moon Conquest, featured two tall towers that resembled human arms reaching toward the sky, and although the project received high praise in the United States, it was never built due to complications in the international political arena in the following years.

“It’s a fusion of Chinese traditions and his learning in the West,” Wang Shou-cheng (王守正), the architect’s eldest son, says of his father’s architectural style, pointing out that Wang Da-hong’s entire life and learning experiences had a definite influence on his work. Born in Beijing in 1917, the architect lived in Shanghai and Suzhou in mainland China before attending Cambridge University in the United Kingdom as an undergraduate majoring in architecture. He then earned a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University in the United States before moving to Taiwan from Hong Kong at the age of 35 in 1952.

Wang Da-hong came to miss his time in Suzhou, his son says of one of the places where the traditions of mainland China’s architecture and landscaping are best preserved, and where the architectural aesthetic the father experienced as a child was later reflected in his designs. Conversely, modern architecture concepts—simplicity and clarity of form and an absence of detail—are obvious in Wang Da-hong’s work, and a result of his Western education, especially at Harvard, where he studied under leaders in modern architecture like Walter Gropius.

Overseas Influence

The melding of East and West in Wang Da-hong has led to outstanding works of architecture. “He didn’t take the easy route of simply repeating traditional Chinese architecture. He endeavored to be creative within his Chinese cultural context,” says architect Frank M.H. Wu (吳明修), explaining Wang Da-hong’s importance to the development of architecture in Taiwan. The 80-year-old Wu still remembers his excitement as he visited Wang Da-hong’s residence on Jianguo South Road more than half a century ago. The exterior of the house had a boxy look with certain Chinese architectural elements, which ranged from the circle-shaped window to the use of walls to create an aura of mystique. “He was constantly striving for breakthroughs, which inspired many prospective architects at the time,” Wu notes.

This creative cultural fusion can also be seen in the headquarters of the ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). This design held personal and historical significance for the architect in that he was the only son of Wang Chong-hui (王寵惠), who joined the movement led by ROC founding father Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) to overthrow the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and became the first ROC foreign minister in 1912 after the revolution. The white and grey colors found on the walls and roofs of many homes in Suzhou are repeated on the MOFA building, which was completed in 1972 in central Taipei. The influence of the time Wang Da-hong spent abroad studying modern architecture can be seen in his transformation of the dougong, an interlocking wooden bracket used in traditional Chinese architecture as a form of roof support. The dougong system used on the concrete building of the MOFA headquarters has a cleaner and simpler look compared with the stacked system used on the Grand Hotel in Taipei, a typical Chinese-style building.

Wang Da-hong’s overseas education made him somewhat unique among his peers, but it more than likely led to a few conflicts with government agencies that commissioned him to develop projects over the years. This was the case with the design for the NPM, which houses a vast number of invaluable Chinese treasures. After the architect won the bid to design the museum in the early 1960s, the top brass of the Nationalist government tried in vain to get him to revise his design so that it would have a more Chinese-style appearance. Finally, the work was turned over to Boyle Huang (黃寶瑜, 1918–2000), who complied with the government’s wishes.

According to Shyu, typical Chinese architecture was the norm in Taiwan from roughly 1950 through the 1970s. That style can be seen in landmarks such as Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Grand Hotel, both of which were designed by Yang Cho-cheng (楊卓成, 1914–2006), as well as the NPM, which opened in the mid-1960s. Shyu notes that the architectural trend encouraged by the government was related to the tensions between Taiwan and mainland China when the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a movement against Chinese culture and traditions, was raging across mainland China. In response, the ROC launched a campaign in Taiwan pushing for a renaissance of Chinese culture.

The National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is another example of this trend toward tradition. Wang Da-hong’s original design for this landmark dedicated to the nation’s founder was not as Chinese as the government wanted it to be, even though the Western-educated architect felt it reflected that quality. This time, however, he made concessions, but he did not assent to every change that the government wanted. For example, he agreed to alter the design so the sweep of the roof was reminiscent of a typical Chinese palace. He also included less conventional features, notably the raised eaves at the front entrance, which appear as if part of the roof has been pulled up like a curtain.

Even though the hall, which was completed in 1972, is the result of some compromise, Shyu notes that thanks to the great talent exhibited by the architect, the building is undoubtedly his masterpiece. “He has an excellent sense of proportion. This is a very unique talent found only in a few architects,” the scholar says of the distinctiveness of Wang Da-hong’s works. Equally impressive is the hall’s sense of closeness for the general public, which is created by its use of space. “The spacious corridors surrounding the hall are an ingenious design feature, creating an environment for Sun Yat-sen and people visiting the site to be close to each other,” says Cheng Nai-wen (鄭乃文), the institution’s former director-general. The visitor-friendly sheltered corridors enhance the approachability of Sun Yat-sen’s statue and have become a popular venue for elderly people taking a stroll and teenagers practicing street dance.

Wang Da-hong’s passion for architecture eventually began to cool during a time when many forms of art tended to serve ideological and political purposes. As Taiwan entered the 1980s, the architect, then in his early 60s, produced far fewer works, and he started to fade from the scene. This period produced only a few notable projects like the East Gate Presbyterian Church on Taipei City’s Renai Road, which was completed at the beginning of that decade.

Time and Space

The architect’s talent as a writer of fiction was revealed in 1977 with the publication of a Chinese-language novel, Du Lian-kue, which is set in Taipei in the 1970s and based on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile, the architect continued a decades-long quest to write an English-language novel. Titled Phantasmagoria, the novel depicts utopian life aboard a spaceship in the remote future. Phantasmagoria was published in 2013, along with a Chinese-language edition that was translated by a fellow architect.

Primarily due to Shyu’s efforts to revive interest in the architect in recent years, Wang Da-hong and his works have started to receive the recognition they deserve. As a result, the highest honors have been conferred upon the architect, while the task of evaluating and preserving his most significant works is underway. In 2013, Shyu and various experts in the conservation of cultural legacies selected 25 projects by Wang Da-hong in Taipei City as a point of departure to discuss the levels of protection given to different buildings by the Taipei City Government. By March this year, 11 of the projects had been reviewed, including former ROC Premier Chang Chun’s (張群) residence, which has been designated as a municipal historical site. According to Shyu, Chang’s home deserves preservation not only because of its architectural value, but also because of Chang’s status in ROC history.

The recreation project based on Wang Da-hong’s house is the ultimate homage to the architect, who is as economical with his words as he was with unwarranted detail in his designs. “I don’t pursue fashions, but I’m not out of fashion either,” he once said, according to his son Wang Shou-cheng. “This means he doesn’t go with the flow, but he has confidence in the value of his designs that transcends time,” says the son. Sixty years after Wang Da-hong’s first residence in Taiwan was built, its replica will open to the public by the end of this year, ready to provide proof of his contributions to Taiwan’s architecture, just as the National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and his other distinctive projects do now.

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw