‘Traditional Morphology and Contemporary Functionality’ The Better Homes Project can be easily compared to a project in Taiwan which helped to regain the cultural living of the T’au tribe residing on the island Pongso-No-T’au. These tribes had previously suffered the insensitive eradication of six traditional villages in the name of modernisation. Traditional dwellings were demolished and the tribes rehoused in ‘rows of concrete barracks’1 by the government in the 1970s-80s without thought to the social consequences. The building practices of this tribe were certainly significant to their culture as they were ‘tied to social norms and ritual, the local environment and continuity of knowledge’2. The new housing caused several social and safety issues, the actual construction of the housing becoming an immediate physical danger to the residents from poor construction due to cutting financial costs, calling for the need to replace them and compensate the residents for the loss of cultural legacy. The design professionals from the National Taiwan University (NTU) who stepped in to replace the dilapidated blocks, studied the traditional dwellings of the tribes closely before carrying out the design process for the new housing. Unlike the project in the 1970s the team wanted to use the building methods and traditions of the original dwellings to use as guidelines for the new housing. Like the Better Homes project, a prototype was built first, of which they saw as an experiment of ‘integration of traditional morphology and contemporary functionality’ applying modern technologies and standards of living to the traditional design characteristics. For example it was orientated towards the sea to establish the relationship between the dwelling and larger landscape – one of the norms of their culture - yet it was constructed with reinforced concrete to increase stability. A local resident in the
1Jeffrey Hou Traditions, Transformation and Community Design Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (New York: Distributed Art Publishers 2008) p.75. 2Loc.cit.