Text/CHUANG Wei-Tzu (Curator)

“Place is a fact of life that precedes science and rests upon the way we experience the world.”　—Tim CRESSWELL

Since 2018, the C-LAB has not only run the space of the former Air Force Command Headquarters with cultural projects in unprecedented forms, but also endeavored to transform this site into an artistic incubator that treats innovative cultural experimentation as its core values. Over the past three years, the C-LAB launched several “experimental architecture” projects that ventured into the essence of this site from different contextual perspectives. For example, “Collective Negative Space Village” concentrated on the relational evolution of this site, whilst “The Brick-O” applied the concept of sustainable city to practical situations. Unfolding from Taipei City in which the C-LAB is located, “Project: The Folly” follows the previous reflection on the change of this site, insofar as to investigate its connotations and implications by reference to its inherent ambiguity.

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In Victorian Britain, “folly” was a garden design jargon for decorative architecture with no practical use. In 1982, architect Bernard TSCHIMI installed multiple steel structures painted in red as the venues for various events in the Parc de la Villette, Paris. He harnessed the special quality of “folly,” viz., capable of accommodating concepts and experimentation, to discuss the new role of a park as a living space for urban dwellers. Apart from exuding an avant-garde aura of novelty, these structures also challenged the original relations between people and the park. Today, a folly is no longer simply an ornamental building that doesn’t serve much of a practical purpose, but a “structure that cannot be certainly classified as architecture or sculpture and doesn’t treat any specific target as its raison d’être.” It has open and flexible connotations, which transmutes itself from a physical structure into a form for experimentation and interpretation.

Inspired by the experimental and conceptual qualities of “folly,” “Project: The Folly” proposes a new viewing angle to grasp our present living conditions and urban events. Reviewing the past of this historic site, we can easily notice that the meaning and function of its space continue to vary in different periods. It is such fluctuation that renders this site one of a kind when people ask the question as to “what kind of ‘place’ the C-LAB is” and meanwhile try to offer an answer.

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Anthropogeographer Tim CRESSWELL pointed out that a place is not just a space to which people have attached significance, but also a definable, meaningful location.[1] The concept of “place” has been interpreted from a riotous profusion of perspectives. Architects or urban planners tend to evoke the sense of place—a place that the multitude identify with, which implies that the place is a recognized part of the city’s history. To put it another way, there are always traces of human intervention in a recognizable, meaningful place. No matter what the intervening force may be and how proper the epistemology is, it is always bound up with the place’s power of creativity.

When it comes to the formation of the sense of place, we can refer to the concept formulated by American geographer Allan PRED. He integrated Anthony GIDDENS’ theory of structuration with Raymond WILLIAMS’ structure of feeling, arguing that all the places we perceived are little more than the by-products of individuals’ active engagement in the ever-changing structure of space-time. Houses, streets, fields, and all other artificial objects, along with every associated activity, “collectively construct, maintain, and shape places by means of taking place or occupying and transforming spaces and nature, and this is a consequence resulting from specific ideological objectives and intentions.”[2] Pred believes that individuals’ subjective actions and structural institutions stand in a dialectical relationship to each other, from which the process of structuration unfolds, and the crux of the matter lies in the place and the sense of place (structure of feeling) gradually accumulated in the flow of space-time interlaced by people’s quotidian routines and institutional projects.

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Another key issue to be tackled in Project: The Folly is how to contemplate, comprehend, and define places and place-building, particularly when the Art Space V (i.e., the U.S. Aid Building) at the C-LAB serves as the exhibition venue. Since the C-LAB, a cultural institution, took over this former military space, this building has been detached from its original function, design, and connotation, becoming an empty existence in a state of instability and ambiguity. Accordingly, we transform the entire exhibition venue into a provisional folly that beckons, inviting the artists to explore the human-space relation and the meaning of this place through different approaches.

First of all, “Project: The Folly” experiments with a reversed viewing angle on the exhibition venue (i.e., the U.S. Aid Building) in the spatial layout of the C-LAB. Given that the location and space of the exhibition venue are radically different from those of ordinary art museums, some of the exhibits in this project set great store by meaningful dialogues with the site. This site harbors not only the heterogeneity of the exhibition space per se, but also the contextual evolution of this location’s history, architecture, transportation, and economy. Among all the participating artists, CHEN Wan-Jen, TAI Han-Hong, CHIU Chen-Hung, and LIAO Chien-Chung utilize the exhibition venue’s environment and the in-situ conditions to develop new perspectives that allow us to rediscover the U.S. Aid Building and the C-LAB.

Secondly, by virtue of all the exhibits, this project attempts to explore the meaning of “place,” especially to reacquaint us with the existing urban system and the rich texture of related spaces. With their respective works equally fascinating in result though different in approach, WU Tsan-Cheng, LING Tien, CHEN Shiau-Peng, TSONG Pu, HSIAO Yu-Chih, and Thai artist Arnont NONGYAO probe into the relations between individuals and the city as well as the texture of public spaces. They represent the traces of dwelling, and address the question as to how architectural plans/structures can act as the catalysts for revitalizing interpersonal relations of a group.

To sum up, “Project: The Folly” gains fresh perspectives on our contemporary life through the intervention of architectural/artistic projects, relational reversal, and non-consecutive change in viewpoint. In addition to exploring the nature of spaces, this project invokes the metaphor of structures to alter the human-space relation, with the aim of blazing a trail beyond benefit-oriented utilitarianism and urban-planning concepts. Can we comprehend the real-world situation here and now from a brand new perspective if we forsake pragmatism for artistic or creative intervention in the post-pandemic era?

[1] Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 7.
[2] Allan Pred, “Structuration and Place: On the Becoming of Sense of Place and Structure of Feeling”, Journal for the Theory of Social-Behavior, Vol,13, No.1, March, pp45-68.