The study presents a rarely-known housing scheme at Lanyu (Orchid Island), Taiwan, built by the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) for the indigenous Tao people during the post-war period. It offers a model for merging anthropological perspectives into architectural discourse at the peripheries of canonical modernism. Lanyu National Housing was one of the largest and earliest housing supply for Taiwanese aborigines, however, it has experienced degradation, remodeling and reconstruction in the past half a century. The housing no longer exists as originally built, the architects were anonymous and there is a lack of documentation recording its construction. Therefore, the study utilises internal governmental documents disclosed recently as field, and employs ethnographies as text, endeavouring to reinterpret Lanyu National Housing at two levels: (1) situated within the trend of state-led modernisation under the context of Cold War and, (2) to seek out the key to disjunction and transition of the dwelling circumstances via the concept of “living house”, a widely shared notion of the intertwined human-house relationships by the Austronesian peoples to whom the Tao belong as dialectics.

     The notion of “living house” emphasizes the significance of comprehending the meaning and the role of house within its social contexts. In Tao’s beliefs, the house is deemed a point of contact that is not only relevant to one’s life cycle, tied up with the marriage that maintains the domestic scene, but also consolidates the social group through the persistent construction of houses. Furthermore, through the holding of the inauguration ceremonies as an inter-village exchange system that comprises the sharing of food resources and labour force as well as maintains the individual’s reputation. That is the social role of house among the dynamic relationships against which Lanyu National Housing severely struck; in short, the latter was a demand “being created” that led to the transition of the dwelling circumstances of the Tao.

     The history of the Lanyu project evidences the multiplicities of transmission and variation that defined architectural modernity and its interaction with different contexts through the post-colonial period.1 For instance, the housing scheme was built by the ROC, a non-Western regime operating under the premise of decolonisation and anti-communism with modernising intentions, especially for improving the hygienic conditions of the Tao as social welfare. However, this programme was overseen by housing advisors from the United States as a result of the U.S. Aid, who were the actual instigators of the initial plan. Simultaneously, the housing presented its regionalism as a hybrid outcome keeping pace with the housing programmes of the main island, and using local materials as well. After inhabitation, the Tao sought to extend and remodel the housing, attempting to merge it into their indigenous cultural system. However, their traditions also responded and changed to their new architectural context, revealed in their experience in the later reconstruction period, which ultimately catered to tourism by chance. In this case, it is evident that modernist influences ‘underwent adaptation and modification by local agents in the process of translation to local settings, mediating between state motives of cultural assimilation and local movements of cultural resistance’,2 yet still underwent creolisation in substance. Modernities at Lanyu were, from and belonged to the Other after all.

     As we view the result from the reconstruction stage, the nonintervention of the government and the lack of experience of the Tao in erecting the modern housing, resulted in commodification and arbitrariness of the built environment. As long as the intervention is necessary, is there a way out? The answer might have been revealed in the unrealised part of the proposal by the government in 1975: the architects should serve as director and assistant offering proposals and techniques rather than build on behalf of the Tao while the locals should partake in the construction process, and be allowed to flexibly adapt the housing after their inhabitation. More importantly, the study argues for the need for collaboration between the field of anthropology and architecture, especially for architectural practices and research beyond the European perimeter. Only if the house is built and dwelled constantly by the Tao themselves, in Roxana Waterson’s terms ‘having people living in it’,3 will the “living house” maintain its vitality as living heritage instead of historic monuments. In this way, Tao’s house as a mirror of the prototype of the God house in mythology4 can be inherited, and consequently, the local knowledge will be able to implement in a sustainable environment. Thus the history of Lanyu National Housing has lessons for architectural practitioners between its rise and fall.