Ruin Academy

Ruin Academy (established 2010) is an independent cross-over architectural research center in the Urban Core area of Taipei City, Taiwan. It is 'set to re-think the industrial city and the modern man in the box' through research and a series of workshops.

The Ruin Academy occupies an abandoned 5-story apartment building in central Taipei. All the interior walls of the building and all the windows are removed in order to grow bamboo and vegetables inside the house. The plants are situated so that their vegetation grows in front of the glassless window spaces, giving privacy to those inside. The professors and students are sleeping and working in mahogany made ad hoc dormitories and have a public sauna in the 5th floor. All the building is penetrated with 6 inch holes in order to let “rain inside”.

The architectural control is in a process of giving up in order to let nature to step in. So far it is not giving up – it is too lazy. Architectural control will be given up. Modernism is lost and the industrial machine will become organic. This happens in Taipei and this is what we study. Ruin Academy is an organic machine. Ruin is viewed as a tipping point when a man-made object becomes part of nature.

The research and design tasks move freely in-between architecture, urban design, environmental art and other disciplines of art and science within the general framework of built human environment. Anarchic Grandmothers, Academic Squatting, Urban Acupuncture-these are some of the ideas behind the Ruin Academy. The Academy workshops include:

Local Knowledge is a theme penetrating through all the research elements and tying the Thirg Generation Taipei to the site-specific natural environment. Casagrande: Architects’ and designers’ position about organic knowledge is tricky. We are not the ones who carry this collective genetic memory on, but we are in a better position to interpret and negotiate with it, step by step, like a shaman getting answers from the organic side. This can easily go very wrong, when architect starts copyrighting fragments of local knowledge under his ego. I guess often it would be enough to create a platform of accidents for the organic knowledge to surface, start cooking, and finding its own forms and dynamics. Design is not necessarily needed in here, and design should not replace reality – while organic knowledge is close to reality, nature.

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