The Feeling of Vastness

There was an almost cinematic quality to the way Huang Sheng Yuan, principal of Fieldoffice Architects in Yilan, Taiwan, presented his work during a lecture at RICE on the philosophy of his practice. As Huang drifted through images of projects from the past thirty years—each steeped in Yilan and intimately tied to its river ecology—he flashed short, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them aphorisms and lines of poetry on the screen. Passages such as “When can be done, some emptiness should be left deliberately,” quietly registered in viewers’ minds. For an audience reckoning with finding better, more just ways of living and practicing—the horrors of yet another act of racial violence fresh on their minds—Huang’s pure and defiant approach of “standing by the weak, fighting against the forceful” was a much needed palliative.