Living with Sky, Water, and Mountain: A Path towards Freedom

March 17, 2021
6:00 p.m.

Zoom webinar

 

Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series: New Proximities

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Huang Sheng-Yuan, Principal, Fieldoffice Architects, presents the lecture “Living with Sky, Water, and Mountain: A Path towards Freedom” on Wednesday, March 17, at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series. 
 
Huang Sheng-Yuan is the principal of Fieldoffice Architects in Yilan, Taiwan, and graduated from Tunghai University Dep. of Architecture in 1986 and received his M. Arch. with Honors from Yale University in 1991. In the early days of his career he worked at Eric Owen Moss Architects as a Project Associate. Before returning to Taiwan, he taught at North Carolina State University. Currently he is the principle of Fieldoffice Architects+Sheng-Yuan Huang and initiated projects such as Yilan Vascular Bundle Project, Yilan City Historical Path refound, Yilan River and Surrounding Community Development, and Yilan County South Cultural Center. All of these projects strive to integrate the building into the existing natural landscape. He has remained as professor at Chun-Yuan Christian University, Dep. of Architecture, and at National Yilan University, Graduate Institute of Architecture and Sustainable Planning, as well as advisor to the Architecture and Arts Committee of Taiwan Council of Cultural Affairs. Since 2016, Fieldoffice Architects+Sheng-Yuan Huang started the touring exhibition, namely Making Places at Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä. In 2017, he just received the Yosizaka Takamasa Award in Waseda University, Tokyo and National Culture and Arts Foundation Award, Taipei.
 
As reflected in their creations, the long-term establishment of Fieldoffice in Yilan and with their design seldom straying from the county, all of which illustrate their intention to not execute architecture with the seemingly plausible and common knowledge. Instead, they wish to integrate themselves with the pulse of the local by living a life that is absolutely genuine and thorough. It is through these perceptions that intimate relationships are formed, without the need for words, between design and factors such as the constantly changing environment and applicability. For Fieldoffice, the core of design does not correspond to architectural construction, and does not end after it is completed. They believe that when the architecture is in use, design is still in progress because life (or application) is a live concept, and is forever in a progressive form.
 

 

The Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series, New Proximities, is a collective reckoning of health as a social, political, and fundamentally spatial condition. The global pandemic has not only produced profound shifts in the built environment, but also revealed latent precarities embedded in forms of governance, labor, domesticity, and ecology. This lecture series asks: how does COVID-19 and its compounding crises render visible the uneven geographies in which we operate? How might we reformat existing systems beyond the confining world of pandemic space? Expanding scales and spaces of architectural agency, we will hear from critical voices in design, history, and theory to imagine new futures of care and proximity.
 
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join.
 
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series for Students in Architecture, and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
 
All spring 2021 lectures are eligible for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs.