Abstract/Summary

While the urban development and the architecture of Taipei during the Japanese colonisation (1895-1945) has been extensively investigated, the architectural style of the shop-house has not been deeply explored. The style of these buildings has often been characterised simplistically as either 'Baroque' or 'Neo Mannerist' without any real attempt to understand the sets of associations. The Taiwanese shop-houses that were produced in this period were really much more complex in style, embracing Western, Japanese and Taiwanese features. It was more translation than imitation. In the light of all this, this dissertation studies both Japanese and Taiwanese shop¬houses in Taipei. The research focuses on how and why shop-house design in Taipei changed in this period, what styles were adopted by their designers, and what meanings and associations these styles have for their audiences. The findings suggest that the Japanese shop-house was more significantly influenced by English nineteenth-century historicist architecture than the others. The Taiwanese shop-houses which built by local craftsmen, such as the Chen-GUO family, were influenced not only by the colonial Japanese architecture in Taipei (namely the Western-style government buildings) and the shop-houses built by the Japanese architects for the Japanese merchants, but also by Han Chinese traditions in design. What this dissertation aims to provide therefore is a more nuanced approach to describing the style in early twentieth-century Taipei, one that owes much to the important Chen-GUO family.