this one?
that long shopping/housing building in ximen looked like an awesome monstrosity.
when did the corrugated iron trend start? these roofs look rather nice. reinstate tiles!
Actually this oneā¦
I was in rural Shenzhen (almost in Dong Guan) for a year and saw many buildings like the one in the picture. If it werenāt for the buses and old cars, I would think that it was present day.
Thatās āthe long shopping/housing buildingā in Ximending, or all the way up and down Zhonghua Road to be precise. It was pretty awesome. Looks dead there, maybe just a quiet day, but in the early nineties the area was roughly as vibrant as it is now.
Cool pics! I saw this url on one of them:
http://shulinkou.tripod.com/Dawg1.html
Has that url already been posted/discussed here before?
Donāt see it in a search, but Iām pretty sure Iāve seen it before. Maybe a URL change
Yeah, I thought Iād seen a āU. S. armed forces in Taiwanā-type site linked and discussed on the board some time ago. Anyway, I like these pics. I feel weird about liking them, because for a lot of the pics, Taiwan was under martial law (unless Iām mis-dating them). Still, I get a kick out of looking at them.
Bittersweet.
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Here it is: back in 2012, Lilā Slugger posted an embedded link to that site:
Sorry, didnāt mean to hijack the thread. 
That red brick with black roof tiles building is clearly a Japanese colonial style building, meaning roof tiles of that style were hard to find for a while under KMT occupation.
When people began favoring concrete boxes for a house, traditional brick and roof tile makers found themselves out of business. The decline of the industry meant traditional roof tiles and even good quality bricks are more expensive. Those looking to patch up their broken roofs often canāt afford the price, and ending up using corrugated iron instead.
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Whut?
Iād figured it must have been something the military dictatorship forced on the people to kill their spirit or something. Like Brutalism or council housing.
Dark red brick is drab, but with the right trim and style it can look elegant in a Victorian way. These things were built to be eyesores.
It was the Japanese who introduced the so called Yang-lou ę“ęØ, which is townhouse-ish hole in the wall store fronts thatās so prevalent in Taiwan today.
For a while having a Yang-lou says a lot about oneās social status. So people started tearing down their traditional houses and putting townhouses up in the middle of the farm.
At first these buildings had many decorations, and sometimes had roofs even though itās not visible from the ground level. As time went on, especially when bricks and wood beams were phased out in favor of standard RC construction, people stopped buying bricks and roof tiles. Once the demand and supply both tanked, itās pretty much impossible for ordinary folks to maintain the look of their traditional houses.
The problem with brick structures is they crumble like cookies in earthquakes. Reinforced concrete aināt pretty, but itās cheap, practical and earthquake/typhoon resistant.
People in other parts of the world care enough about the aesthetic consistency of their cities, they simply hang non-load-bearing pre-cast brick panels on the walls. Itās what they do in New York anyway.
Actually, thereās lots you can do to make concrete look better. That tile must have helped, when it was clean and undamaged. But too many houses show no effort at all.
yea its a pity. now we have a different type of tiles prevalent. bathroom tiles. covering 90% of buildings. the colour choice isnāt good either.
We also get wall tiles paving the floors making them super slippery when wet. Good for a shoe skating practice in the rain though.
Is there a backstory behind the combination of gray and off-pinkish?
Seems like bare concrete is often the motif of choice.
And the rust stains from those cages over the windows.
Taiwan was a poor country, but that was a while ago. What gives?
(I know thereās a mindset that comes from having grown up poor. But that fades a bit over time.)
