Over the past two centuries, the city has been shaped as much by politics and socioeconomics as by architects and planners.

BY DAVID FRAZIER

More than two decades before architect CY Lee designed Taiwan’s tallest and most famous building — the 508-meter-tall, pagoda-inspired Taipei 101 — he produced another.

It was an ostensibly more modest structure, a 15-story Taipei department store at the corner of Nanjing East Road and Dunhua North Road. Taipei’s Asiaworld Department Store (later renamed Breeze Nanjing) was completed in 1983 and was not only innovative for its design — with a curved glass façade, the building seems to hover above street level like a gigantic ship — it also represented a watershed moment in the capital city’s architecture.

“After the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang, KMT) came to Taiwan in the 1940s, for the first several decades, the government controlled all development and construction, even housing,” says Roan Ching-yueh, a 69-year-old architect and award-winning writer.

“Before 1980, Taiwan’s landmark buildings were all political buildings,” he says, naming several of Taipei’s neo-Qing monuments of the 1970s and 1980s, like the Grand Hotel, National Theater and Concert Hall, and National Palace Museum.

“But after 1980, it changed,” says Roan. Taiwan’s political transition from martial law to democracy, along with profound changes in the economy and society, brought seismic shifts in the forces driving architectural development. “From that time, the landmarks were all commercial buildings. Architects switched — now they mainly worked for developers — not for the government anymore,” he says.

That was hardly the first time the shaping forces in Taiwan’s capital had undergone a major transition. Over the past century and a half, the city has seen successive Qing, Japanese, and Kuomintang (KMT) eras. Each of these left its mark on Taipei’s built environment, though those traces are often hidden beneath later renovations and redevelopment, preserving the histories of past eras.

Few observers are as familiar with Taiwan’s postwar urban transformations as Roan. Born in Pingtung County in 1957, trained in architecture in Taiwan and the United States, and now a professor at Yuan Ze University in Taoyuan, he has spent decades examining how cities evolve. While overviews of Taipei’s architecture often focus on landmark buildings, Roan says the underlying trends in materials, construction techniques, urban planning, and social behavior have played a greater role in determining what the city has looked like. He focuses more on the unique characteristics of different historical eras, rather than the heroic landmarks by which those eras are often defined. By examining the changing nature of the urban fabric, he has been able to uncover the practical reasons why buildings were built the way they were.

Qing Dynasty architecture

The Qing empire controlled Taiwan from 1683 to 1895, but it was only in 1887 that the capital was moved from Tainan to Taipei. Very little original architecture from this period remains, but two representative types of the era can still be found in western Taipei: temples and gates from the old walled city.

Temple design derived from the folk architecture of China’s Fujian Province, the main source of Taiwan’s Han settlers from the 17th to 19th centuries. The Han built their first temples in Taipei during the 18th century in the riverside trading settlements of Wanhua and Dadaocheng. These places of popular worship were designed with a courtyard-style layout, roofs of bright orange glazed tiles, and gables capped with colorful, swirling dragons. The most famous is Taipei’s Longshan Temple, which dates to 1738, though the current version was rebuilt in 1924 after the original burned down.

When Qing officials established Taipei as Taiwan’s capital in the late 1800s, they refashioned it as a traditional walled city. According to the writings of Canadian missionary George Leslie MacKay, who arrived in Taiwan in 1871, Taipei’s buildings at this time were generally just one story tall and constructed mainly of red brick walls capped by wooden-trussed, clay-tiled roofs. Of the five gates of the original city wall, four still survive today, but only the North Gate dates back to its original construction of 1884. This two-story stone blockhouse with a timber-framed, tiled roof was modeled on the imperial architecture of northern China and offers a rare example of the Qing’s vision for Taipei. It is now preserved on a small traffic island in the bustling district near Taipei Main Station.

Japanese colonial influence

When the Japanese took control of Taiwan in 1895, they quickly dismantled the Taipei wall to make way for a more modern city — a planned grid of broad boulevards subdivided into smaller lanes and alleys. This radical vision, first formulated in 1900 by the head of a new urban planning division, Yoshio Murakami, has determined the basic shape of central Taipei.

The city plan also initiated a migration of the city’s commercial center eastward to a newly relocated train station — a spot very close to today’s Taipei Main Station. This new transport hub sat at the foot of Zhongshan North Road, which was then called Onari Kaido or “Imperial Boulevard” and became the city’s main commercial artery.

This pattern of Taipei’s eastward migration continues even today. As the city grew, new money and new construction needed new land. That meant heading east. From Taipei’s earliest Qing-era settlements in the western riverside districts, the city’s commercial center has over time shifted to Taipei Main Station during the Japanese era, to East District (the area around Zhongxiao Fuxing and Zhongxiao Dunhua MRT stations) from the 1960s to the 1980s, then to Xinyi District from the 1990s to the present day. Some say the migration now continues into Nangang, the easternmost flatland zone in the Taipei basin, which became home to the Nangang Exhibition Center (2008) and the city’s largest shopping mall, LaLaport (2025).

From the early 1900s, the Japanese built a collection of buildings that remain even now as civic monuments centered in western Taipei’s government district. The most famous is the Presidential Office, which was completed in 1919 as the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan. An impressive 130-meter-wide building of red brick and white masonry that’s centered around an eleven-story tower, its design followed the style of Japanese architect Tatsuno Kingo, who drew heavily from Britain’s Victorian and Queen Anne-style architecture.

Other prominent remaining Japanese colonial monuments include Taipei Guest House (1901), the National Taiwan Museum (1915), and 228 Memorial Museum (which was built in 1937 as the Taiwan Education Association Building). Two complexes that now stand as reclaimed cultural zones, the Huashan 1914 Creative Park (1914) and Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (1937), were originally Japanese factories that produced rice wine and cigarettes, respectively.

As a group, these buildings exhibit what Roan describes as a sort of generic colonial style. “It’s a little bit European, a little bit Japanese, and there are also some Taiwanese elements,” he says. “It’s really a mix of everything.”

Buildings grew slightly taller under the Japanese with the proliferation of two- and three-story brick or masonry shophouses. These were mostly occupied by local Taiwanese merchants and can still be found throughout western Taipei, most notably in Dihua Street, now famed for its shops selling loose-leaf tea and traditional delicacies. Architecture in these colonial high streets tended to be conservative, but one can also find a few scattered gems of Art Deco and European modernism. “For a Taiwanese to become a doctor at that time, they had to study in Japan,” says Roan. “Often they came back from their studies and built their clinics with these styles to signal their modernity.”

At the same time, Roan adds that “Japanese and Taiwanese residential areas were kept very separate.” Japanese civil servants and teachers occupied “the heart of the city” — especially the districts around Shida Road and Yongkang Street — where they lived in single-story wooden houses with tatami mat floors and rooms separated by sliding screens. In the 1950s, these same neighborhoods were taken over by Chinese civil servants and teachers, but the wooden houses were replaced with low-rise concrete apartments. A few Japanese houses remain peppered throughout these neighborhoods.

Postwar architecture

Taipei’s concrete building boom followed the end of World War II. From 1945, Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT regime assumed control of Taiwan, and all Japanese were forced to repatriate to Japan. As Taipei had been bombed during the war and suddenly needed to accommodate an influx of more than a million Chinese refugees, cheap, fast construction was a priority.

Reconstruction efforts saw a major influence from U.S. aid programs, which supported Taiwan’s infrastructure development from 1951 to 1965. Virtually every department in Taiwan’s government interacted with U.S. aid agencies, and funding guidelines for construction projects dictated the adoption of American standards, including detailed schematics and English labeling on all architectural diagrams.

U.S. firms like Adrian Wilson and Associates, which constructed buildings for the U.S. military around Taiwan, also influenced designs for Taiwan’s new civilian architecture. These new imported styles were fully modernist and highly functional, applying cantilevered roofs, curtain walls, and American rationalist concepts like “form follows function.” On the campus of Taipei’s National Taiwan University, you can still visit the Agricultural Exhibition Hall (1963), which was built with a structure of concrete beams and columns and exterior walls that were perforated with cylindrical tiles to allow airflow.

The most influential prototype of the post-war years, however, is the Minsheng Community. A U.S.-style planned development for 70,000 residents, Roan argues that it “shaped the look of Taiwanese apartments for decades to come.”

Construction for the residential development began in 1965 and was underwritten by U.S. aid loans. The template it established — a set of four-story walkup apartment blocks built of concrete and rebar — was repeated throughout Taipei over the next 20 or 30 years and remains a dominant style throughout the city.

1970s: elevator buildings

One major factor limiting building height was the cost of elevators, which were deemed too expensive for normal housing until the 1970s, when newfound wealth arrived in step with Taiwan’s rapidly expanding export economy. “Before elevators, the maximum height you could build was about seven stories,” says Roan. “If the building were any taller, it’d be much too difficult for anyone on the upper floors.”

Elevators now allowed construction to reach up to twelve stories, a scale that quickly became prevalent throughout the booming East District, which also became home to a new collection of department stores. These new height standards were determined by building codes, which calculated a building’s maximum height according to the width of the road on which it stood. The limits were later relaxed around 1990 to allow for taller buildings.

At the same time, the 1970s introduced a major trend of retro-Chinese buildings in “neo-imperial” or “palace-style” designs. Many of these are still considered Taipei’s most famous landmarks: the National Palace Museum (opened in stages from 1965 to 1984), the Grand Hotel (1973), Taipei’s Songshan Airport (1971), and the National Theater and Concert Hall (1987).

These buildings were inspired by the great monuments of the Ming and Qing dynastic capitals and reflected a particular political moment in Taiwan’s history. In 1971, the island’s Republic of China government lost its seat in the United Nations, and it saw the United States break official diplomatic relations in 1979. The government reacted to this growing sense of diplomatic isolation by pushing for a renaissance of “Chinese” cultural identity. The effects could be seen in music, literature, fine arts, and architecture. New public monuments emphasized the classical features of Chinese imperial architecture: symmetrical, three-part vertical designs, overhanging roofs supported by grand vermillion columns, and roofs of glazed tiles with swept-up eaves.

Taipei’s Grand Hotel, for example, was directly inspired by the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing’s Forbidden City. But constructed with modern techniques, this new collection of traditionalist showpieces achieved unprecedented scale. The Grand Hotel achieved a structural height of 87 meters and, upon its completion, stood as Taiwan’s tallest building — a record it would hold for another eight years until 1981.

The skyscraper era

The building that finally surpassed the Grand Hotel in height, albeit by a paltry 70 centimeters, was the city’s first skyscraper, the First Commercial Bank Building on Chongqing South Road. Built with a steel frame and glass curtain wall construction, the 22-story building nevertheless announced the start of a trend of skyscrapers that has now produced the towering skyline of Taipei’s Xinyi District.

Today, greater Taipei has 236 buildings over 100 meters in height, and 39 of over 150 meters — and the skyline continues to grow. These urban towers include some truly mind-boggling design and technical innovations, from the 660-metric-ton oscillating steel sphere used to dampen the effect of earthquakes inside Taipei 101 (2004) to the DNA-spiral construction of the nearby Agora Garden (2018).

From around 2000, the city government also began to incentivize a scheme of urban redevelopment, which has seen many older apartments replaced with modern high rises. As such, Taipei’s cityscape continues to evolve. New layers continue to replace and overlap with the old, even as the past is preserved and reborn. As Taipei continues to grow, its urban fabric becomes ever richer and more complex.