Wisteria Teahouse is a historical monument in Taipei. It’s famous for its brilliant cultural history and is thought as a public space in Taiwan. The thesis is to analyze the collective process of spatial production through the theories of architectural design.
Aware of the public history, the thesis focuses on the private history. The process of spatial production will be observed not only through great cultural discourses but also through unnoticed individual actions. Two questions are important: How did people gather here and organize? How did the spatial production go under such a group?
Actually, a “group” is not certainly familiar, public or well-organized. It’s only a crowd of various individuals under certain relationship. From the viewpoint of organic growth, the space of Wisteria Teahouse as a whole is formed by many individual actions as a part. How people form the space depends on the way they organized.
Here I bring up two frameworks to investigate the experience of Wisteria Teahouse. From CH3 to CH6 I divided the history into four periods according to their public condition in order to observe how people organized. And in each chapter I classify the spatial production into a category of three kinds of action: physical act, management and interpretation. Various participants have three ways to do something to form the whole space.
The experience shows a process of practice. People practice how to organize and how to produce space at the same time. From individuals to a public organization, the group matured; form acting at random to acting according to spatial discourse, the way of spatial production matured.
However, the process of practice is not so wonderful.
When the group becomes more and more public and well-organized, the individuals inside get less and less free; when the spatial discourse rises, the individual spatial action loses its creativity. Through the private viewpoint, we see the contradiction in the process of practice.
