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The City Beyond Architecture: Sheng-Yuan Huang and the work of Fieldoffice
Alessandro Martinelli

In the future, Asian settlements will outnumber those of other continents. Most interestingly, the Far East’s urbanization has nothing to do with what happened in the West, where suburbanism has finally come to dominate the lives of most people. In Asia, activities are all mixed, and one can find agricultural production sitting side by side with housing, temples, or high-tech factories. It is a new kind of mixitè and, if properly managed, it looks the like of something more sustainable than a European or American periphery. In this context, there is another thing that just started to develop. It is a public space capable of structuring this particular landscape and provide both social spaces and a sense of identity to the place. In a way, it is developing what landscape urbanism has been theorizing for some time. But here, it is a concrete matter, especially in places the like of Taiwan, where some form of public participation in politics is possible. It is the like what happened at the onset of the Tessiner architecture school in South Switzerland, or the times of the Barcelona Olympics in Catalunya, those unique occurrences of city-making where innovations of planning or design have been put forward and shaped new forms of urbanism. But here, it is something that ‘resonates’ with what most of the future urban world may be. Sheng-Yuan Huang and his colleagues of Fieldoffice are the avant-garde of this architectural movement, which is producing a new form of collective living in terms of design and culture. They are also those that somehow test new planning and design systems, i.e., experiments from where we can learn about what the Asian city and landscape may be. In the light of it, this book is a first attempt to frame the work of Fieldoffice in terms of city-making, but also highlight those aspects of the urban design process that can offer reference to planners and designers around the world.

Bio Previously involved in research projects and didactic activities about the contemporary urban condition at the Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio and the i2a in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal, the Archivio Cattaneo in Cernobbio, Italy, the Shih Chien and the Huafan University in Taipei, Alessandro Martinelli is Assistant professor at the Department of Landscape architecture, the Chinese Culture University, Taipei. He is also editorial director of ListLab publishers and works with BIAS Architects, Taipei, on architectural and curatorial projects that concern the public space today.

Softcover, CMYK offset, 288 pages, 170x240 mm

Authors Alessandro Martinelli, et al.
Location Taipei, Taiwan
Publisher ListLab