Ideology, Identity, and Architecture :

Modernism, Postmodernism, and

Antiquarianism in Taiwan
William S. Tay

Architecture is ideology frozen in time . As long as it is not destroyed, architecture is a

permanent, synchronic existence . But beneath any surface synchronicity, there is al-
ways a layer of historicity, the specific moment when a structure was conceived and
constructed . In this perspective, no different from other forms of art, architecture is also
overdetermined, in the Althusserian sense, by the configuration of the infrastructure
and the superstructure at a particular historical moment . Ideology and its traces,
diachronic in nature, are then frozen or buried within the architectural presence . By
ideology I do not only refer to the explicit trends, modes, and movements of the
architectural history, but also to the implicit value systems, world views, and imaginary
ways one comes to feel, understand, and interpret materialistic existence and its
concomitant human relationships . It is in this sense that architecture can also be read as
indicators of identification, icons of identity .
This brief paper is a preliminary attempt to gather my thoughts about some of the
architectural forms and their ideological underpinnings in Taiwan . The paper makes no
attempt to give a coherent historical argument, but consists merely of several fragments
of reflections .

Western Modernism and Chinese Antiquarianism

Functionalism is generally considered as the guiding principle of the Western moder-

nist architecture movement during the first half of the twentieth century . The essence of
functionalism is perhaps best summed up by Louis Sullivan's well-known aphorism
"form follows function" (1896) . Functionalism or architectural modernism is not only
a significant change in aesthetic paradigm, but is also a new way of confronting new
materials and different modes of making and producing . The new architectural mean-
ing is generated by a movement from the understanding ofthe form to an understanding
of the intended use of the form . The dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the
dispersion of its members in the United States, in many ways not unlike the destiny of
the Frankfurt School, eventually resulted in establishing architectural modernism a
world-wide phenomenon .
The history of teaching, learning, and experimenting with architectural moder-
nism in Taiwan is an area still awaiting full investigation . But in terms of the economic
growth and development of Taiwan, one can safely argue that the American variations
of the glass-concrete-steel International Style which drastically altered the American
cityscapes in the fifties did not arrive in Taipei until the mid-seventies . The Taiwan
modernist styles are often replications of their Western models . The late-modernist
styles (glass boxes and more self-aware combinations of shapes), which began to
appear in the late seventies and early eighties in Taipei, continue to be copies of their
Western counterparts. As these modernist and late-modernist buildings are so con-
spicuous in Taipei, examples are perhaps unnecessary . Such massive simulations of the
West in Taiwan may suggest to some - say, the government officials in charge of the
island's international image and publicity - "internationalized development" and
economical prosperity. But to others, such an architectural practice may be interpreted
as cultural dependency and absence of self-conscious creative reflection. This massive
transplantation of the Western architectural forms also leads to an oft-disputed and
theoretically more intriguing issue, i.e., the complex relations between ideology and
artistic forms .
In the orthodox Marxist mechanical-reflectionist perspective, the modernist and
late-modernist forms favored by corporate institutions are ideologically suspect, a
simple case of "guilt by association ." However, in the more sophisticated view of
Theodor W. Adorno, the glorification of usefulness by functionalism may be a failure
to realize that as long as the nature of the society remains unchanged, with profit as an
insatiable desire, usefulness as a revolutionary concept in architectural aesthetics
cannot exist autonomously and would be displaced into some forms of subjugation and
exploitation. Adorno's argument confers upon usefulness its own life and dialectic,
revealing its dilemma and entrapment as the inevitable consequence of the larger,
infrastructural forces of the bourgeois society. Using the nouveau roman as his ex-
amples, Lucien Goldmann has persistently argued for an indirect homology between
capitalist infrastructure and literary production with the artist as a mediating transin-
dividual subject. Following the logic of these two arguments, one can move one step
further and argue that the cityscapes created by the modernist and late-modernist
designs are mediated refYactions of the capitalist mode of production and its con-
comitant objective and subjective alienation . The hardness of the building materials,
the opacity of the megastructures, the extremities of the spaces, and the discontinuity of
the serial vision are only some of the qualitative defects raised by Edward Relph, a
scholar of urban studies . Robert Sommer, an environmental psychologist, even con-
tends that the prison can be seen as the "real model" of modernist urban designs, for the
metal fences, blank facades, barren space, and the spartan feeling appear to intimate
authority in control .
But these discussions, from the orthodox mechanical to the mediated dialectical,
are all situated in the Western base-superstructure relationships . In the case of Taiwan,
when the Western modernist architectural designs began to appear, the per capita
income was less than US$2,000, still a long way from being labeled as a NIC (newly
industrialized country) . This absence of a similar infrastructure simply repudiates any
discussion of the Taiwan modernist experiments in the Western context and reduces
these experiments to technical borrowings and superficial imitations without the
ideological trappings . In this case, the original ideological implications of the Western
form are neutralized ; instead, they are replaced by new ideological significations
generated by the relationships between the First World and the Third World . Further-
more, as Taipei had never had any genuine urban planning in the last five decades, the
sudden rise of the modernist and late-modernist structures did not come about in any
organized grand scheme, hence creating a coexistence of Western modernism with a
motley mixture of forms . Despite the sharp incongruity of the cityscape, such inadver-
tent juxtaposition, paradoxically and perhaps quite fortunately, had allowed the city to
avoid total segregations of activities and to retain some indeterminacy and flexibility of
the urban landscape for a period of time. Nevertheless, as old communities rapidly
vanish and new structures of various forms and shapes mushroom, the cityscape of
Taipei is perhaps by now beyond any rational redemption, a case not unlike the
developmental experience of the metropolises of many Third World countries.
If in Western architectural modernism, usefulness is not only privileged but also
merged with aesthetics, the former notion certainly has no organic role in one kind of
contemporary Chinese design, which can be described as Chinese antiquarian architec
tural practice . By Chinese antiquarianism I refer to the duplications, usually without
conscious reflexivity of the original principles of usefulness and/or beauty, of the
various external forms of traditional Chinese architecture with modern building
materials and methods. The Grand Hotel constructed in the sixties and expanded in
1971 is perhaps the most illustrative example of this architectural practice, which was
initiated in early twentieth century China by Western architects as a means of repre-
senting the so-called Chinese spirit (figures I and 2) . In the practice of some self-con-
scious Chinese architects in the twenties and thirties, the problematique is no longer the
slavish replication of the traditional styles, but how to invent a new lexicon or grammar
which can be nationalistic as well as modern . This quest is no different from the
numerous attempts in twentieth century Chinese poetry to search for new forms which
are organic combinations of vernacular Chinese and modern sensibility. But this issue
of the minzu xingshi [nationalistic form] or minzu fengge [nationalistic style] is par-
ticularly insurmountable for architecture as its practice is financially taxing and techni-
cally demanding .
The Chinese antiquarian copies in Taiwan have consistently been sponsored by
the government as a bureaucratic compromise to consciously project a "Chinese"
image. But official concession for whatever reason is certainly no justification for
Chinese architects not to wrestle with a crucial aesthetic issue, which even foreign
architects practicing in China felt obliged to tackle . In my survey which is undoubtedly
incomprehensive, the Taiwan design for the Osaka World's Fair by Li Zuyuan (Li

Figure 1 . Grand Hotel entrance .

Figure 2. Front view of Grand Hotel .

Tsu-yuan) and others is a rare, early endeavor to create a representation which is both
"modern and national ." The dearth of designs in the latter mode and the prevalence of
Chinese antiquarianism continue to remind us of the difficulty of the modernization of
China. And the two extremes and their coexistence - imitation of Western modernism
and return to Chinese antiquarianism - can be interpreted as symptoms of ideological
confusion and failure to forge a new cultural identity .

Postmodernism and Third World Simulacrums

The meanings, periodizing, continuities, and discontinuities of modernism and

postmodernism in the various art forms have consistently been entanglements in the
critical practice and theoretical discourse of the past two decades . Postmodern architec-
ture, however, is a decisive break from its predecessor: Robert Venturi's slogan "Less
is a bore" (1966) is the exact opposite of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more"
(ca. 1923) . In this paper, postmodernism in architecture is understood as a system of
representation which encompasses both the traditional and modern Western styles and
embraces unabashedly both high and pop culture with ornamentalism, decorativeness,
pastiche, collage, parody, and playfulness as some of the manifest characteristics. This
understanding derives essentially from the practice of American architectural
postmodernism, which, to some critics, is different from the European reactions of
modernism.
By incorporating elements from the classical, the vernacular, and popular culture,
American postmodernism appears to be more egalitarian in spirit - seemingly a
distinct contrast from the imposition of the modernist designs on the masses with or
without their welcome by a few architectural elites . However, this strategic move also
allows some of the more playful and carnival designs, in particular the huge shopping
malls and the downtown renovation projects, to be easily co-opted into the late-
capitalist, multi-national, consumption-oriented economy, thus surreptitiously under-
mining the surface egalitarianism and accessibility . And if the poetics of allusions -
from the partial reproduction of a classical segment to the re-creation of a decorative
detail - is not intellectually recognized by the users/spectators and is merely per-
ceived as "fun," or vague reminders of remote historical moments that one sometimes
has glimpses of in film productions, does not this poetics of reproducible quotations
reduce itself into a new, revitalized version of kitsch on a grand scale? In its demolish-
ing of the organic or quasi-organic sense of beauty in the traditional aesthetic paradigm,
architectural modernism can at least lay claim to a new authenticity besides being a
determinate negation (bestimmte Negation) or positive critique of the socio-cultural
condition . As Adorno once put it in general terms : "Modern art with all its blemishes
and fallibilities is a critique of success, namely the success of traditional art which was
always so unblemished and strong . Modernism is oriented critically to the insufficiency
of an older art that presented itself as though it was sufficient" (Aesthetic Theon 229).
But for postmodernism, since the poetics of intertextuality generates its effect and
newness precisely from the borrowing and juxtaposing of older signs which are now no
more than empty gestures, the new architectural practice is not only incapable of the
critique of its predecessor, but is perhaps ensnared to survive as an art form of
inauthenticity .
In this sense, the recent massive importation of American postmodernism into
Taiwan-even the glamorous and successful simulacrum of Hongguo (Hung-kuo)
Business Tower (1991) at Tun-hua North Road designed by Li Zuyuan and constructed
in 1991 - becomes copies of copies, echoes of echoes, foreign insertions which once
again belie the ideological subordination and cultural dependency of a country that has
never ceased the boasting of its long and glorious heritage. But if American postmoder-
nism has played a constructive role in some multi-billion downtown renovation
projects which, despite being modern-day marketplaces, have at least carved out spaces
for "pleasurable" spectacle and carnival atmosphere, the simulacrums in Taiwan have
sadly failed in this respect . However, in the most paradoxical way, the simulated
American postmodernism in Taiwan, in terms of its return to historicism and its rhetoric
of intertextuality, may also serve as an inspiration to grapple with the daunting chal-
f
lenge of a modern n2inu ngge . The Jiantan (Chinn-t'an) Youth Activity Center (1989)
by Zhu Zuming (Chu Tsu-ming) and the Penghu (P'eng-hu) Youth Activity Center
(1990) are two conscious and creative attempts in this direction by evoking a sense of
the Taiwan architectural past through the selective and unobtrusive amalgamation of
traditional local building materials, basic forms, and decorative styles - the former
appears to be more successful in this delicate negotiation of the past and the present
(Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6) . But the invasion of American postmodernism does not mean
that the modernist, late-modernist, and Chinese antiquarian designs are out . The
paratactic coexistence of these different styles is an analogy and a reminder of the
simultaneous advocacy of sharply divergent Western literary modes and trends in the
twenties and thirties of China . It is then perhaps not unjustifiable to argue that even
when the end of the century is to arrive soon, the more prosperous society of Taiwan is
still struggling with Western cultural hegemony.
Figure 3. Jiantan (Chien-t'an) Youth Activity Center.

Figure 4. Jiantan (Chien-t'an) Youth Activity Center.

Figure 5 . Jiantan (Chien-t'an) Youth Activity Center.

Figure 6. Jiantan (Chien-t'an) Youth Activity Center .

Japanese Colonialism and Chinese Authoritarianism

Taiwan was Japan's colony from 1895 to 1945 . In terms of the global colonial history,
the Japanese adventure in Taiwan, if judged by the standard of achieving cultural
domination and ideological control, is not a "successful" one. However, the Japanese
colonializing of Taiwan is perhaps a most unique case for the following reasons : (l)
Unlike the Western imperialist rule of Latin America, Africa, and other parts of Asia,
which was consistently total and absolute, with the original indigenous powers com-
pletely subdued or demolished, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan was then propor-
tionately a very small area of China . More significantly, the motherland continued to
languish as a huge geographical polity across the Taiwan Strait, thus posing as a
reminder of sovereignty to the people if not as a threat to the occupation forces . (2) As
the Chinese written language and classical Chinese literature were part of the cultural
heritage of the Japanese elites, a decisive case of cultural superiority was not easy to
fabricate . Western powers, however, were able to rationalize their expansions and
suppressions on the basis of the chauvinistic perceptions of their own cultures. (3) Part
of the Chinese philosophical and religious traditions absorbed by Japan centuries ago
allowed the two countries to share certain affinities in these realms ; perhaps these
affinities made it difficult to destroy the national and cultural consciousness of the
colonized as they were not entirely opposing systems .
Perhaps the only superiority which Japan could boast of at the time of taking over
Taiwan was that Japan was the first industrialized and "Westernized" country in Asia.
(Needless to say, there must have been other claims and justification which would
require a scholarly archaeology to unearth) . Indeed, Japan's occupation of Taiwan was
confined to rudimentary industrialized development in the Western manner. The lin-
guistic and literary colonization of Latin America and Africa by the Western powers did
not happen in Taiwan, as witnessed by the perseverance of the Chinese script and the
Fujian dialect. If the Japanese dominance and superiority were to be mainly rational-
ized on the ground that they were the first "Westerners" in Asia, then it was not
accidental that instead of constructing a governor's building in the Japanese style,
which was adopted for other structures such as the railroad stations, the Gothic
Revivalism of Victorian England was emulated. (During the Meiji era, in order to
accomplish the task of constructing government buildings and to establish an education
system for architecture, foreign experts were invited to Japan - among whom the
British architect Josiah Condor was the most influential .) Since government buildings
are nearly always representations of historical character and even ideological content,
obvious traces of and ties to earlier models are almost prerequisites . The Japanese
governor's building in Taipei can then be read as a concrete symbol of Japan's
derivative Westernization, its inability to project an unambiguous identity as a coloniz-
ing master, for perhaps never in the global colonial history a colonizing power had to
appropriate a foreign design as the embodiment of its authority .
After 1949, this building became the presidential office of the Nationalist govern-
ment (Figure 7) . After the death of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, a memorial
hall was built almost next to this Victorian Gothic Revivalist structure . Chinese anti
quarianism was once again the solution to the problem of design ; but in this case there
were compelling ideological reasons for this solution. The design of the memorial hall
was clearly a simulation of the Altar to Heaven complex [Tiantan] in the southeastern
Figure 7. Former Japanese governor's building in Taipei .

Figure 8. Memorial Hall for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek .

suburb of Peking. In this complex, the most significant structure is the Hall of Prayer
for a Prosperous Year, where past dynastic rulers or Sons of Heaven performed their
annual rituals to heaven and earth . This Hall is a triple-roof (symbolizing heaven, earth,
and men) circular structure raised on a flat marble terrace surrounded by three con-
centric levels of 360 white stone balustrades ; bright blue tiles cover the roofs and a
gilded ball is mounted on the top . The circular structure on a round platform enclosed
by a square wall - two basic forms observed by the other structures of the complex -
are concrete symbols of the traditional notions of heaven and earth (circular tian and
square di) . By performing rituals to heaven in this Hall, the imperial ruler was cast in
the role of the only and ultimate mediator of the heavenly forces . The duplication of the
forms, shapes, colors, and even the directions (the imperial north-south axis) of the
Prayer Hall for the Generalissimo's memorial hall is so blatantly ideological that the
point needs no further belaboring (figures 8 and 9) . But besides evoking the imperial
aura for one of the last strong men of traditional Chinese patriarchal politics, the
replication of the Prayer Hall also contains another ideological implication which one
can read into it: the legitimacy of the Nationalist government and its claim, long after
the defeat of 1949, as the sole legitimate ruler of all China. In this sense, one can even
argue that the Generalissimo's memorial hall is configuration of nostalgia and myth

Figure 9 . The statue of Chiang inside the memorial hall is an imitation of the Lincoln statue
in Washington, D .C.
Figure 10. The music hall (left) and the theater (right) adjacent to the Chiang Kai-shek
memorial hall are also antiquarian duplications.

(Figure 10) . But in the face of the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan in
recent years, which includes one incident of vandalizing the exterior walls of the
memorial hall by a prominent member of the opposition, the authoritarianism exuded
by this antiquarian transplantation is certainly gone, though the hall will probably serve
in the future as a memorial of the government's authoritarian past.

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Glossary

Chiang Kai-shek 11
di tLb
Hongguo (Hung-koo)
Jiantan (Chinn-t'an) 0
Li Zuyan (Li Tsu-yuan) IfIfI W
minzu fengge
minzu xingshi R ffirt
Penghu (P'eng-hu) rwl

tian
Tiantan
Zhu Zuming (Chu Tsu-ming) T~~~