Ouroboros City | Lu, Hao-Yeh

Kenting,Taiwan, complexity and contradiction in such a surrealism place . Surrounding by national park ,resort , beach, and Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant(NPP).

There’re many signifiers of building type in here. Waste stock as palace axis , water tank as square, drainage as canal, and nuclear power plant as cathedral. It’s the Zeitgeist of contemporary civilization, after theocracy, sovereign, and democracy.

courtesy of Lu, Hao-Yeh

In such Post-Fukushima Era, nuclear power debate turn into ideology, critique of pure rationalism is considered as blaspheme. Science become above suspicion.

Nowadays Maanshan NPP is ready to decommission in the near future. The vast campus, the timetable of purification, the final disposal which half-life period much longer than history of civilization,et cetera. Those issues consecrate of this site to transcendent industrial heritage .

courtesy of Lu, Hao-Yeh

From this beginning, back into Ouroborous , the symbol of alchemy, the predecessor of modern science, a self-eating , self-inflicted , self-creation. In the sense of Eternal-Return and one is the all. And create such a city like Angelus Novus of Walter Benjamin : ” Not a optimist press forward, but a storm what we call progress, irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned . “

All in all, re-think decommissioning nuclear power plant, try to tell an architecture fable story, a fictional city which science considered as religion and mythology, a future archeology dystopia .

courtesy of Lu, Hao-Yeh

Project Credits:

Project Name : Ouroboros City : The Death and Rebirth of Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant

Name : Lu, Hao-Yeh

School: Tunghai University

Adviser : Liou, Guan-Hong

Arch2o has received this project from our readers in order to participate in the Students week 7 event, you may submit your own work for publication in the Students Week 8 by sending it to igraduate(at)arch2o.com