Landscape Of Traces (A Century Of Transformations)

The Railway Department Park, part of the National Taiwan Museum and designated a national historical monument, occupies a site that carries 129 years of Taipei’s urban transformation. The first railway started here during the Qing Dynasty to service the Machinery Bureau which manufactured weapons. It later became the Taipei Artillery Factory and finally the Taipei Railway Factory in 1900. Adjacent to the modern day Taipei Main Station, the museum park is one of the green focal points in the ambitious Taipei West District Gateway Project which stretches across almost a third of downtown Taipei.

Over the past century, there had been many “versions” of the site. An industrial service site, constructions were mostly done by the Japanese in utilitarian and haphazard ways. As the railway hub for over a century, the park’s insouciant past of politics, war, industry and urban growth is what draws historians, rail fanatics, and citizens to its storied ground.

The “Landscape of Traces” design concept envisions past transformations on the site as historical imprints or urban traces to be revealed to the public. With only rudimentary maps and records available, archeological reconstruction is meaningless and impossible as part or most historical remains were permanently dug out during subway constructions.

The “blurred”, “gradient fade” and “fuzzy edges” design language becomes a strategy for approximation without claiming absolute positions. Traces of past structures are expressed as blurry imprints on the museum grounds, their overlaps and collisions tell the stories of over a century of growth and transformation here.