Nest-Building for a New Generation: Renovating Old Homes

When ­Chiang Chi-yang accepted the 2014 Old Building, New Life Award from the Tai­pei City Urban Regeneration Office for his WEDO•Guang­tian project, he shared a photo of his grandfather with the audience. He explained: “My grandfather used to tell me that not being a very good student wasn’t a big deal so long as I worked hard at something else. This is the first time I’ve won a big award. Thank you for watching over me, Grandpa!”

Originally his maternal grandfather Li Xi­lin’s dental clinic, the building that became WEDO•Guang­tian had been vacant since his grandfather passed away. ­Chiang, who was born in 1976 and heads the Wedo Group, renovated the old clinic both as a means of providing his company with a more ideal work space, and of preserving his grandfather’s story and a bit of family history.

Chiang Chi-yang (in the center of the photo on the facing page) plays with lighting aesthetics in his studio in hopes of helping people better grasp how lighting affects spaces.

WEDO•Guang­tian, located on Section 2 of Yan­ping North Road in the Da­tong District, presents visitors with a fantastical intersection of space and time. A steeply inclined wooden staircase leads to the second-floor studio, where sunlight streams through open windows into a space more than five meters tall that is scented with Taiwan fir.

An antique dental office plaque hangs above the entryway. Inside, a medicine cabinet shaped like a giant curio box has been transformed into a display case holding his grandfather’s portrait, dental instruments, and spectacles. In addition to work areas, the bright window-filled space also includes sofas for reading or chatting. Nearly all the office’s furnishings were once owned by ­Chiang’s grandfather.

But Chiang didn’t limit himself to simply restoring the old building. The new interior includes a modern, open-plan kitchen with an island, as well as a wall converted into a red chalkboard covered in visitors’ signatures and graffiti. Articulated lamps create atmospheric lighting that adds an upbeat, yuppie vibe to the space.

Lee ­Ching-chih, an associate professor in the Architecture Department at Shih Chien University and one of the judges for the Old Buildings, New Life Awards, says: “The whole space is like a museum dedicated to his dentist grandfather, but without the solemnity and tension of a museum. The preservation of the structure and the expert lighting design have seemingly reanimated the memories and spirit of the old building.”

“Being able to see and enjoy the sky from your home in Taipei is an incredible luxury,” says Jau Yin-shiang. Jau, who rents an apartment in a traditional row house, was so taken with the building’s courtyard that he renovated the apartment himself.

Chiang says that when his grandfather passed away nine years ago, he was reluctant to jump into any sort of renovations. Two years ago, he finally decided that the time was right. After obtaining the consent of his family, he brought his colleagues with him to survey the long-idle building. “That night, I dreamed that my grandfather smiled and asked me in Taiwanese to raise a glass with him. He was as candid as ever and gave me the sense that he approved.”

Unfortunately, when Chiang and his team began cleaning up the place, they learned that the building’s apparent solidity was only skin deep. They found termites in the attic’s wooden flooring, and had to clear them out before the bugs spread to the beams. When they later removed the plaster to restore the walls to their original look, they discovered that the bricks underneath were badly degraded and very uneven.

Someone recommended that he simply rebuild it from the ground up, arguing that starting over would be cheaper than attempting to restore the building. But Chiang felt that the building’s spirit was still present and that its wear and imperfections were physical manifestations of its history. He was unwilling to use new materials to recreate its old look because he felt that doing so would destroy those “memories.”

They ended up doing a great deal of work on the attic, removing its termite-infested flooring, replacing its wooden beams with steel, and reframing it in steel. When redoing the wall, they left the brick of three pillars exposed, then surfaced the rest in cement to protect it. Even though he used modern materials for some of the work, Chiang insisted on retaining an “aged look” by not applying rust proofing to the steel and leaving the cement unpainted. “The old and new materials will integrate as they age.”

Jau put his design sense to work turning the old building into a wonderful living space. He is convinced that other renters too can turn their current apartments into ideal living spaces, rather than waiting until they buy their own homes.

Chiang is a lighting expert who has worked for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and applied his creativity to numerous stage performances and public art displays. He sprinkled some of his lighting magic onto his own work space, using minimal illumination to create a rich atmosphere.

He designed three different lighting systems for WEDO• Guang­tian’s kitchen alone. When holding a meeting around the central island, they use LED tubes hidden among the ceiling beams, which not only provide adequate lighting, but also clearly delineate the meeting space. When someone is using the kitchen, they instead use lights mounted beneath the cabinets that illuminate only the sink, countertop, and stove area, minimizing any disturbance to other people in the office. There are also two wall-mounted light fixtures that provide gentle illumination at the edges of the space when the other lights are off. ­Chiang uses these to create atmosphere by shining them on the wall’s old-fashioned, segmented drainpipes, which were preserved in the restoration.

“Lighting exists not just to facilitate people’s activities, but also to create atmosphere and set a mood,” says ­Chiang. In the few months since he moved his company into the space, he has come to feel that the building is a living, breathing organism that needs regular care to survive.

“Being able to see and enjoy the sky from your home in Taipei is an incredible luxury,” says Jau Yin-shiang. Jau, who rents an apartment in a traditional row house, was so taken with the building’s courtyard that he renovated the apartment himself.

Not everyone has the opportunity to pour their creativity into a family property, but those with the will can revitalize even an old rental. Jau Yin-­shiang is a pioneer of this latter sort.

Jau lives by himself in an old Fu­jian­ese-style row house located between Di­hua Street and Xi’an Street in Tai­pei’s Da­dao­cheng neighborhood. The home’s exterior has clearly seen better days, and some of its neighbors look to be on the verge of falling down, but Jau’s second-floor living area looks like a fashionable New York loft. The red brick, the meticulously chosen furniture and décor, and the glass doors leading out to the garden-like courtyard work together to give it an air of elegance and avant-garde sophistication.

A product designer, Jau studied architecture and philosophy at university. Moving to Tai­pei from Tai­chung two and a half years ago, he discovered that rents in Tai­pei’s center were exorbitant and began looking for a place a little distance from the core. The first time he walked into the old building where he now lives, he thought its interior wall made it feel cramped in spite of its 46 square meters of floor space. He also noted that the window had been sealed to install an air-conditioner and that the whole interior been painted white. All in all, it struck him as a generic, inexpensive urban studio.

But when he saw the covered walkway and courtyard behind it, he felt a rush of enthusiasm and signed the lease.

Jau explains that buildings in the Da­dao­cheng area traditionally had shops in front and homes in back. They were usually just five meters wide, but as much as 80 to 100 m deep. To ensure that light and air reached the interior­, they were designed with three building sections separated by two courtyards. Jau’s apartment is the third section on the second floor.

Interestingly, traditional row houses used to place their sanitary facilities along the covered walkways of the courtyards for both technological and hygienic reasons. Some people might regard the need to step outside to use the rest­room as an inconvenience, but Jau doesn’t see it that way. Instead, he finds it an enjoyable aspect of his city life.

“Just imagine, instead of walking into a chilly bathroom first thing in the morning, you wash your face and brush your teeth in a sink out in the sun. At night, you bathe and use the bathroom in the kind of semi-outdoor space you’d find in a country villa. It’s like having your own personal mental oasis. Not to mention, washing up outdoors every morning wakes you up fast!”

Jau’s main takeaway from his renovation process was to listen to the old building. “The space will tell you what to do.”

His first step was to restore the space to its original look by removing the stucco from the interior wall to expose the brick underneath, and taking out the drop ceiling to reveal the Formosan cypress roof beams. He then unsealed the window to let light into the room, which gave him new inspiration. He placed a comfy chair next to the window and filled the nearby wall with bookshelves. An enthusiastic cook, he also created an open kitchen opposite the bookshelves and put a combination dining table and desk in the middle of it.

He added wooden flooring to the covered walkway alongside his beloved courtyard to bring the indoors and outdoors together. Then, because the first floor of the courtyard had been converted into a storage space with a corrugated steel roof, he created a “visual garden” by installing a steel mesh at the second-story floor level, laying pebbles over it and decorating the space with green bamboo.

“Friends often ask where I bought the gorgeous light fixture hanging above the dining table. The truth is that the design was completely fortuitous!” Jau explains that when he removed the drop ceiling, he discovered that one of the wooden beams had been replaced with a steel beam. “I was incredibly excited by the mix of new and old, and decided to make full use of it.” He took a hoist trolley from a factory gantry crane, and attached to it a light fixture he had designed himself.

Jau put long hours into redoing the interior, all the while thinking that it was a rental he would live in for just three to five years. “I’ll need to find a new home when I marry and have children.” Nonetheless, he has a very positive view of renting instead of buying, and argues that you can rework a rental into your ideal living environment provided you maintain good relations with your landlord. Looking ahead, he expects more people to realize that you can live well in older neighborhoods. “If more young people move in, they could really revitalize these old neighborhoods.”

A group of architecture students and teachers used recycled materials and their own labor to renovate a disused old building on Mt. Yangming, turning it into a cultural center.

Taipei’s recent urban renewal has destroyed many of the city’s lovely old neighborhoods and replaced them with towering apartment and office buildings. Many people worry that these upgrades are robbing the city of its history and charm, and will leave it just another bland and nondescript metropolis.

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad. The trajectory of Taipei’s Old Building, New Life Awards is a case in point. In recent years, the projects submitted for consideration have become much more diverse, and now range from dining halls, coffee shops, and art galleries to hostels, studios, and private homes. Many of these projects involve young people who, in their focus on livability and local character, are turning old buildings into bridges between past and present.

URS 27M, the winner of the 2014 Old Building, New Life bronze medal, is a 50-year-old building on Mt. Yang­ming that a group of architecture students and teachers turned into a naturalistic public space to promote the idea of living in harmony with the environment. The Solo Singer Inn, which won a 2012 Old Building, New Life Special Award, is a hostel on Bei­tou’s “Hot Springs Street” that was renovated by a group of young people who used local history and literature to create a spiritual way station for travelers.

Lee Ching-chih suggests that the Old Buildings, New Life Awards are a sort of cultural index of an evolving city. He argues that when city residents value old buildings and spaces, and reuse them in a creative fashion, it indicates that the city’s appreciation of culture has advanced to the next level.

Renovating old buildings does more than give new life to just the buildings themselves. It also revitalizes the people who do it. Here’s to more wonderful encounters between old buildings and people!

A group of architecture students and teachers used recycled materials and their own labor to renovate a disused old building on Mt. Yangming, turning it into a cultural center.

This former dental clinic was renovated by the dentist’s grandson. It now acts as a repository for family memories and as a forum for exchanges between past and present.

Chiang Chi-yang (in the center of the photo on the facing page) plays with lighting aesthetics in his studio in hopes of helping people better grasp how lighting affects spaces.