Grace Hill (Lìtíng Zhuāngyuán 麗庭莊園) is a former wedding venue situated in an industrial park in Neihu, Taipei. It opened in 2005 under the management of the Zhǎngxìng Wedding Company (長興婚禮事業有限公司), an outfit keen to disrupt the local market with a larger, more extravagant space for weddings and other events. The business struggled at first but became more widely known after it was featured in television series, music videos, and the news. In 2007 the space was leased to Dears Brain (迪詩), a Japanese wedding company hoping to enter the Taiwanese luxury wedding market. The original owners took a step back, ceding control of day-to-day operations to Japanese management, and the business continued to grow over the next several years.
Content collected here have something to do with Taiwan's postmodern architecture, mostly structures from recent decades with striking and unusual designs. Postmodern architecture is rather difficult to define the boundaries of, particularly removed from a western cultural context, but for our purposes we'll just stick with anything of an institutional nature that defies convention and obviously makes a statement.
Linkou Lightning Building 林口閃電大樓
Linkou Lightning Building (林口閃電大樓) is an infamous ruin not far from the newly-opened Taoyuan Airport MRT line in Linkou, recently named the fastest-growing district in New Taipei. Media reports often describe it as the Linkou Monster House (林口怪怪屋) and it regularly appears alongside the Longtan Monster House and other examples of the genre. While I wish there were a good story to go along with these photos it sounds as if it is simply a failed construction project where nobody wanted to cover the cost of demolition until recently.
A Gem of a Storefront
A classy storefront in Hsinchu not far from the train station.
This storefront immediately caught my eye when I arrived in Hsinchu a few hours ago. Both the facade and the lettering are unusually classy, showing a vintage style of design not commonly seen here in Taiwan. This is a jewelry shop, as the clever use of characters would suggest, and its formal name is Xīnfǔ Zhūbǎo 鑫府珠寶. The first character, xīn 鑫, is known as a sāndiézì 三叠字, or triplet character, and is composed of three instances of jīn 金, which means gold. Whoever designed the lettering obviously had some fun integrating a sparkling jewel into the two characters on either side of the shop’s name!…
Asia Museum of Modern Art 亞洲現代美術館
The Asia Museum of Modern Art 亞洲現代美術館 (official site in Chinese) is a strange thing to find amid the rural-industrial sprawl of southern Taichung. Located on the outskirts of historic Wufeng, it is part of the much larger Asia University 亞洲大學 campus, itself riddled with European-inspired architectural curiosities like a gymnasium designed to look like the Colosseum of Rome. The art gallery, straying from the kitsch theme of the rest of the university, is an original design by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. It took nearly seven years to build and opened in 2013.