Searching Through Tea : 尋茶 : An Ethic of Design Grounded in Taiwanese Tea Culture

This project explores how architecture might express a contemporary Taiwanese identity through the spatial and cultural qualities of Taiwanese tea practice. Arguing that Taiwan’s layered colonial history and late democratization have produced an ongoing search for self-definition, the project treats tea culture as a lens through which uniquely Taiwanese ways of being can be understood. Rather than focusing on the formal aesthetics of tea rituals, it identifies four underlying qualities within Taiwanese tea gatherings—warmth, diversity, generosity, and sensoriality—as key spatial and cultural principles. These values are translated into an architectural and urban design strategy for a public park in southern Taiwan, conceived as a space of hosting and everyday gathering. Through intentional gathering spaces, porous thresholds, shared communal amenities, and materially rich sensory environments, the project proposes architecture not as a fixed representation of identity, but as a platform that enables Taiwanese cultural values to be practiced, experienced, and continually re-formed in everyday life.