Fieldoffice Architects, led by the internationally renowned architect Huang Sheng-Yuan, is recognized within the Taiwan architectural community for their award-winning public buildings and uniquely free work culture. In this book, Fieldoffice employees recall the process, ideas, and inspiration behind some of their best-known works.

Led by renowned architect Huang Sheng-Yuan, Fieldoffice Architects are an outlier in Taiwan’s architectural landscape. Their offices are not housed in a metropolitan office tower, but in the open fields of Yilan County. Their work is celebrated around the world, but they do not accept high-paying commercial projects, instead spending most of their energy on public buildings with limited budgets and strict requirements. This book, their first collaboration with the publishing industry, consists of in-depth interviews that reveal the firm’s working philosophy and creative process.

In casual conversation with three Fieldoffice architects, the first chapter lays out the characteristics of the firm’s unique organizational culture: principal architect Huang Sheng-Yuan’s ability to draw out the hidden talents of others, an egalitarian organizational structure without a defined hierarchy or roles, which allows even interns to freely suggest creative solutions to problems, and Huang’s tendency to act less like a boss, and more like a mentor, or a friend, to his employees. The interviewees are candid about the challenges and joys of working in this unorthodox manner, while also unveiling the details of how cases are handled within the office.

The chapters that follow provide in-depth introductions to eighteen of Fieldoffice’s architectural works – including Cloud Gate Theater (seven years in the making), Shih-fang Yang Memorial Garden (six years), Kamikaze Aircraft Shelter as War Museum (eleven years), and Cherry Orchard Cemetery Service Center (nine years) – followed by interviews with more than twenty Fieldoffice employees who give first-person accounts of the moving stories and unexpected twists that occurred behind the scenes.

Each project represents Fieldoffice’s aspiration to propose an alternate vision of society within the medium of space, and the intention to provide end-users a venue for open-ended thought and reflection. In a society that values efficiency, Fieldoffice’s blatant disregard for timelines may strike some as foolish, but if critics were to enter one these buildings, they might find themselves unwittingly engaging in a dialogue with design. This is why Fieldoffice has managed to patiently carry on for so many years with such dedication to their principles – and if this book facilitates an authentic encounter between Fieldoffice and like-minded readers, the seven years spent on its production, like the long years spent on so many of their works, will not have been in vain.