Detach / Recombine
Strip objects of their expected use, then assemble their parts into unfamiliar relationships.
Graduation Thesis · 2020
The Fourth Place
An Indeterminate Field
What if home, work and informal gathering no longer occupied separate rooms?
01 / Graduation Thesis
Three places begin to lose their edges.
Ray Oldenburg described home as the first place, work as the second, and informal gathering as the third. This thesis takes one speculative step further: when all three overlap, space is no longer determined by a single name. It becomes a fourth place—an open field continually rewritten by occupation, exchange and time.
First placeHome
Second placeWork
Third placeInformal gathering
Fourth placeAn open field formed through overlap
02 / Tengaiten Theater
A building already accustomed to change.
Tengaiten Theater had already lived several lives: theater, cinema, ice factory, shrimp-fishing arcade, pigeon loft and parking lot. Instead of returning it to one preferred moment, the proposal treats this accumulated instability as the material of the project.
- 1919Tengaiten Theater
- 1946International Cinema
- 1975Taiyuan Ice Factory
- 1993Arcade · Pigeon loft
- 2012Parking
- 2020The Fourth Place
03 / Existing + New
Keep the shell. Loosen the script.
Approximately forty percent of the existing building—the outer shell and remaining roof framework—is retained. New floors, bridges and vertical elements are inserted as an independent system, allowing circulation and use to cross rather than settle into fixed rooms.
04 / Physical Studies
Remove the name. Rebuild the relationships.
Three physical studies became operations rather than formal answers. Each tests how familiar objects and boundaries can be dismantled, loosened and recombined.
Unbound / Gather
Let activity draw a loose field instead of enclosing it with a definitive wall.
Indeterminate / Fourth Place
Use fixed and unstable elements together so different forms of occupation can remain connected.
05 / Spatial Framework
Not a stack of rooms, but a framework for occupation.
The exploded axon reads the building as a sequence of fields. The retained shell anchors the site; new plates, ramps and passages carry domestic, productive and collective life through one continuous system.
Architecture does not need to name every form of life. It can remain unfinished enough for another use to begin.
Originally completed in 2020. Re-edited for this archive in 2026.
Graduation thesis — Edison Fang + 陳亮臣 · Tengaiten Theater, Taichung · 2020