Design intentions
Ruin Academy is a cross-over architectural research centre in Taipei. The work moves in-between architecture, landscape urbanism, sociology, environmental art and circus. There is a public sauna in the 5th floor. The Academy occupies an abandoned 5-story apartment house in central Taipei. Bamboo grow through windows and it rains inside. Professors and students are working and sleeping in the dry corners and farming the rest of the building. 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. - Marco Casagrande

Technical data
500 m2 in 5 floors, plan 20 x 5 meters.

Project team
Marco Casagrande, Architect Nikita Wu, Project Manager Lea Yi-Chen Lin, JUT Coordinator Yi-Ling Hung, JUT Coordinator Frank Chen, Project Assistant / C-LAB Yu-Chen Chiu, Project Assistant / C-LAB Casagrande Laboratory in co-operation with JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture