Solid State Taipei (SST) will focus on the design of an architectural prototype in Taipei, Taiwan. We will begin where the 20th-century legacy of Taipei’s Zhonghua Road district expired, with the design of a building at the intersection of national identity, socio-economic progress, and urban vitality.

Beginning in the early 1960s, a generation of Taiwanese found a doorway to the world along Zhonghua Road: eight buildings and an urban context filled with audio equipment shops. We will start where electronics–a now anachronistic term–trailed off, disappearing into an ether of its own making. Transistors, tubes, and capacitors have long since been replaced by a different lingua franca whose touchstones are scarcely touchable: information, media, and belief. Half a century ago, we soldered electrical components together, hoping to make something good: a radio, a telephone, a TV. 21st-century Zhonghua Road is immersed in a wholly different (quasi-technological) synthesis predicated on interpretation, extrapolation, and plot…on something more akin to social exchange than parts assembly. We make markets, stories, and relationships. We construct truths–pre-supposing that’s still possible–alongside struggling to grasp what truth means. And, invariably, we want to sort this out while sipping a flat white in a fetching room.

EXCHANGE
Solid State will begin with an assertion: Architecture is never more significant than when it shapes exchange. Visceral, human exchange. A person in a room with other people, a moment’s eye contact, a chair scraping on the floor. Our concern will be with the definition of tangible space that feeds and is fed by the technological ephemera enveloping much of contemporary life.

PROGRAM
The SST program will include two parts: Office Space and Collective Space. These programs will be treated hierarchically. Office Space will be framed as generic, a white noise activity essential to contemporary urban life, but, for our purposes, no more than a reservoir for feeding Collective Space. Our priority will be on Collective Space.

The program will comprise approximately 80% Office Space and 20% Collective Space. 80% white noise and 20% exchange intensity. Your attention will be reversed vis-à-vis this programmatic distribution: 80% on Collective Space, 20% on Office Space.

FOCUS
Our focus will be on architecture. While we will work in a city, this will not be an urban design studio. Participants will be expected to develop mature architecture articulated in plans, sections, diagrams, views, models, and other instruments important to our field.

TRAVEL
We will travel to Taipei during the GSD’s allotted travel week.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. Courses that meet only on Tuesdays will meet for the first time on September 9th. Courses meet regularly otherwise. Please refer to the GSD academic calendar for additional details.