Reviving the Past: Corner 60's by Yu-Jui Chang

Transforming a Traditional Taiwanese Dwelling into a Modern Oasis

Corner 60's is a renewal project that marries the aesthetics of old Taiwanese architecture with modern design principles. The project breathes new life into a corner building in a quiet community, preserving the old tiles, fine stone finishing, and window grille that mark the era this building has been through. The design captures the local architectural aesthetics and the social fabric of old buildings, which are often lost in the contemporary urban environment.

The original site was a typical Taiwanese middle-class residential dwelling. The design team focused on converting the programmatic and physical shortcomings of the floor plan into a modern dwelling with new and enriched living possibilities. Boundaries of conventional housing posed by solid partitioning were broken down, creating domains with boundless usage.

The design team preserved the old fine-pebbles floor, mosaic tiles, and patterned window grilles, and reused the original large door and wooden furniture. The addition of new materials, such as black ironwork, solid timber pieces, and glass tiles, aimed to return to the original materiality, to the natural, and bring a sense of transparency to the new-age living. This synergy pays homage to the old materiality while creating a new spatial visual of permeating and interwoven flow of the new materiality.

As a three-story building of 180 square meters in area, the design team worked on reinforcing and reinventing the old run-down structure. They opened up what used to be a closed-off space for modern living usage, while devising a few experimental design detailing to bring the exterior light and air into the interior. This was achieved by utilizing the air-draining effect of trees to draw air from the ground floor to the second floor, and using the density of the foliage to adjust the ventilation intensity, creating a naturally ventilated space.

The project faced challenges in improving the interior ventilation due to the building's urban lane location. The solution was to completely open up the ground-floor entrance as well as parts of the second-floor slab, coupled with tree-plantation in the atrium, creating a vertical light and wind atrium between the floors. The design also tackled the issue of an elongated floor plan by utilizing spatial tools of double-height, penetration, and diversification to enrich the contemporary living within an old housing domain.

Corner 60's was awarded Golden in A' Interior Space, Retail and Exhibition Design Award in 2018. This prestigious accolade is granted to marvelous, outstanding, and trendsetting creations that reflect the designer's prodigy and wisdom, embodying extraordinary excellence and significantly impacting the world with their desirable characteristics.