YU-HSU CHOU
Visual Artist
ISLAND OF STRATA
Spatial Histories of Taiwan
Strata Landscape Geometric Composition IV
Island of Strata looks at the urban facades of Taiwan as surfaces shaped by time, necessity, and adaptation.
Rusted metal sheets, tiles from different decades, rooftop additions, exposed pipes, signs, windows, and improvised extensions accumulate across buildings without following a single architectural plan. Their coexistence is not primarily the result of design, but of everyday decisions made in response to changing needs.
I see these facades as a form of urban sediment. Each layer carries traces of a different moment, revealing how buildings are continually altered rather than simply replaced. History remains visible not through monuments, but through ordinary materials and the ways people continue to inhabit and modify space.
Taiwan's cities have developed through successive periods of political, economic, and social change. Within these images, those histories are not presented as a chronological record. Instead, they coexist on the same surface—compressed into the present.
Island of Strata is therefore not simply a study of architecture. It asks how a place remembers its history when that history is embedded in the spaces of everyday life.
If architecture can accumulate time, what can an ordinary facade tell us about the history of a place?
Grid Intervention nformal Structure I
Facades of Survival Informal Structure II
Skeleton structure Informal Structure III
Overlaid Planes Informal Structure V
Material Deposition Informal Structure VI
Linear Interweaving Informal Structure VII
Heterogeneous Composition Informal Structure VIII
Residual Information Informal Structure IX
Interfacial Mending Informal Structure X
Canyons of Survival Informal Structure XI