the city within the school, or vice versa? (2023)

Tainan Train Station operates as an urban condenser where multiple temporal, spatial, and social systems intersect. As an infrastructural node converging major circulations, it produces a dense field of encounters that extends into the surrounding urban fabric, where education, commerce, labor, culture, and everyday life overlap. The university campus situated behind the station occupies a critical threshold between institutional space and the heterogeneous realities of the city. With the impending underground transformation of the station, the project questions how spatial reconfiguration may destabilize existing relations and generate new forms of collective assembly and intellectual exchange.

The project positions architecture not as a container of knowledge, but as an active medium through which knowledge is produced. Understanding learning as an event rather than a fixed program, the project proposes “color space” as an indeterminate field where movement, time, and encounter intersect. By allowing students and teachers to cross paths unpredictably, space becomes a pedagogical instrument—one that enables spontaneous dialogue, mutual influence, and a continuously evolving educational ecology.