We did our best in preserving the old tiles, fine stone finishing and window grille that have marked the era this building has been through.
The owner, a teacher with enthusiasm on education and love of old buildings, hopes to create a learning environment for students, so we proposed a renewal idea that bestows experimental opportunities for students, as well as becoming a café space for cultivating neighborhood interaction. We envisaged a home that houses a lab space for kids to conduct scientific experiments, a gathering place for neighbors over coffee.
From the viewpoint of the dwelling characteristics, this design seeks to capture the local architectural aesthetics and the good old corridor social fabric in the old buildings, which are too often on the demise in the contemporary urban environment.
The original site is a common Taiwanese middle-class residential dwelling, which has been preserved architecturally so as to represent the original structure of Taiwanese culture and its aesthetic characteristics as the central idea for the restoration and design, while focusing on converting the programmatic and physical shortcomings of the floor plan of such elongated building into a modern dwelling of new and enriched living possibilities; breaking down boundaries of conventional housing posed by solid partitioning, so that each newly created domain has boundless usage.