The two-tiered Mountain Village Square is located between the spontaneous settlement of migrant labors along the sloping path and the Taiping Elementary School as well as the KEELUNG sign landmark above. As another constructed path leads to top of the hill, one can overlook the Keelung Habor from the elementary school.
The lower-tier of the site, also the larger one, used to be a residential area, surrounding a long house that accommodate several residential units. Abandoned for decades before, the long house was tear down and the place became an anonymous non-place that was disjointed to the rest of the world. After the elementary school closed in 2017, the place become more derelict. Four years later, the school building was repurposed into an popular incubator base with a small independent bookstore in 2021 and once abandoned place become a passage before ascending to the next destination.
The design of the Mountain Village Square disrupt the outlawed atmosphere while acknowledging the memory of the place. On the lower tier, the larger trees and the upper and lower edges of the terrace are retained. Corten steel and grassland become the new element, while many of the original concrete and asphalt pavement shape the basic palette of the place. Some pavements were removed and repaved on site for further scrambling effect.
The Corten steel panels follows the new set of stairs that define the edge of the upward circulation. The stairs create new opportunities for orientation and lingering before meeting the roadway on the upper exit, thus minimizing the conflicts between pedestrian and vehicular traffics. The planted grasses coexist natural-grown ones that feed on the precipitation and seepage. Together with the sweet gum tree (Liquidambar formosana) on the site, they provide a diverse experiences of being in the partly closed, partly opened sloping site.
The weathered steels exert a sense of time upon installation, while the surfaces are destined to collect more watermarks in the rainy mountain town. The existing watermarks on the exposed concrete piers that support the roadway further contrast the smoothness of new concrete surface. The design bends and inters metal corrugated panels underneath he cantilevered roadway by the upper slope further collect and guide rainwaters to the grassland before they seep into the ground or fall into the droplets. Other details on the surface texture, joints, and sewer covers work together to tell a better story of water movement.
The upper tier of the square reorganizes the interstitial place between the elementary school and KEELUNG sign landmark into two triangles. The smaller triangle accommodates the stair and theater-like seatings, which is connected to the larger one that borders the new curving paths that shape better visual and pedestrian connections.
Overall the design rewrite the past of the mountain village with specific material and weathering effects in mind, reconnecting this “ghosted” landscape through conscious writing the inscribe the narrative into the ground through skillful reweaving of forms and matters along different levels and circulations.
Location:
Ln. 113, Zhongshan 1st Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Keelung City , Taiwan
25.134122388176955, 121.7371357175867
Design year:2021
Year Completed:2024
