Syracuse Architecture students joined their counterparts from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan and Hong Kong University for a week in Taipei to visit the site of their joint design project, the Taipei Train Depot in the Xinyi district.
Under the leadership of Dean Michael Speaks, architecture students had the opportunity to collaborate with students from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan and Hong Kong University to develop design proposals for a site in Taipei, the city selected as the World Design Capital for 2016.
This past March, thirty five Syracuse Architecture students and five faculty members spent a week in Taipei as part of three studios led by the director of the Syracuse Architecture program at the Fisher Center in New York City, Angie Co, visiting critics Jimenez Lai of Bureau Spectacular, and Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu from the Oyler Wu Collaborative. The students joined their counterparts from the universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan for a visit to the site they worked on jointly, the Taipei Train Depot site situated in the Xinyi district of central Taipei. As part of this unique program, students were able to focus on real world urban issues and function as a kind of global office.
The trip was made possible for Syracuse Architecture by Todd Rubin ’04 and the Rubin Global Design Studio. Rubin, a member of the School’s advisory board, has sponsored previous trips to Baku, Azerbaijan and Copenhagen, Denmark.
Student work from the Syracuse studios and NCTU and HKU was on display at an exhibition at the Fisher Center in New York that opened on May 2. Students and faculty from all three schools attended the opening reception to view and present the work from the semester. The following day, a symposium was held at the center focusing on the many urban and architectural competitions that have taken place in Taiwan over the past ten years. Participants included Neil Denari, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto and David Tseng, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Chiao-Tung in Taiwan.
