Parallel worlds in the same house.
The visual texture of Taipei is never dull. The ordinary and the extraordinary weave into an architectural environment of dynamic relief. In recession or boom, there are always construction sites toting their fly-wheel cranes from behind corrugated iron fences with muddied trucks rolling in and out the gates. In residential areas, such sites usually follow the demolition of a leafy Japanese-era house or simply a tired old apartment building. In these short-lived vacancies, a particularly Taiwanese phenomenon blooms: the sales house.
The sales house is a curious and flighty creature. Amid a flurry of plywood and the fire of staple guns, it goes up in a couple of days. Landscapes are applied from the back of a truck and the whole lot is covered with flashing lights and logos. On completion, it transports the viewer to another world with its pretensions to grandeur and obvious references to famous buildings.
The advertising arm of the sales house is an overwhelming experience that includes salvos of brochures, banner waving at strategic crossroads, small trucks plastered with posters and billboards in concert across the town. They all point the way to the latest must-have in real estate. However, this estate is anything but real.
The architectural confections that are sales houses range from the sleek and simple lines of Bauhaus-inspired design to the highly decorated fuss of the baroque. They do, however, all have one thing in common: they are completely at odds with the buildings they purport to represent. In this way they are, for their short lives, unreal estate.
At the very high end of Taipei's residential real estate market is Ruentex Group's sales house and reception center, Dunren, on Dunhua and Renai circle. Chinese Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek built these wide avenues to connect his presidential palace to what was then the international airport at Songshan. Both are grand boulevards with broad rows of trees designed to give a favorable impression to foreign guests. The impression is not misplaced, and their convergence is the ultimate location, location, location in Taipei. So desirable is the place, in fact, that Ruentex Construction Division P.R. Manager Vincent Chou says they need not have advertised at all.
The sales house on the circle looks like a giant, slightly unhinged paperclip. Its frame, forged from what appears to be one length of wrought iron rail, faces southwest onto a verdant roundabout and is filled with discreetly mottled glass. Visitors are met by security guards because viewing is by appointment only, and curious photographers are read the riot act. Once past the heavy doors and Zen pebble ponds that are ubiquitous to the sales house, clients are ushered to tables and chairs in a mezzanine reception area and served espresso by smiling waiters.
The sales steward presents a thick, bronzed and textured booklet that compares the building-to-be to a string of landmarks in London, Paris and Beijing. In English it then describes Taipei variously as a "poetic city," "always the focus of the world's eyesight," "King's land, once and forever" and a "fashion kingdom." The architect, Huang Yong-hong, and his creation feature briefly just past half way and are followed by a blurb on digital architecture and pictures of Norman Foster's Great Court at the British Museum. The architect's ovular, thatched dome in the lobby promises to "make you free and warm." The company chairman in a hardhat urges readers to "esteem the value of your life" and tech specs follow.
After coffee, potential buyers are escorted to the heart of the matter: the mock-up building itself. Walking through a series of rooms connected by dramatic double doors, they peruse models of the building, its high-tech construction methods and materials in cross-section.
At the top of the stairs, visitors stamp their feet in a box that wraps the shoes in a scratch-proof bag--the doors now open onto 135 ping of luxury living. It is like a 1950s Hollywood movie set where everyone lounges and ponders a great view and, at NT$900,000 (US$28,570) per ping, it might as well be.
The decoration sets out to be luxurious. Acres of marble floors roll under the designated areas for reading, watching TV, chatting, sitting, eating, bathing and sleeping. You get the feeling that people would not live there unless they were making a movie; the size of the place is ludicrous for what is really just a two-bedroom apartment. Chou points out that it is just a mock-up and that buyers are free to configure the apartments in any way they please.
Ruentex will tailor the internal walls according to their clients' desire, unlike low-end construction companies that provide nothing more than the concrete box on the plans. In fact, the company also provides building management services and imports the high-tech building materials that it uses for the residences of the rich. It is a vertically integrated construction company that focuses on branding from land to laundry.
Ruan Qing-yue, a teacher of and writer on architecture, thinks that companies like Ruentex have had a positive impact on the construction business. "The definition between the middle and the high end of the market has become much clearer recently," he says. "When the real estate market dropped [in the late 1990s], many developers were cut out, eliminated. The survivors have better quality, better structure. Professionalism has gone up."
Homebuyers are now far more confident of their purchases than they were in the roaring real estate market of the 1980s and early 1990s when more than a few construction companies sold buildings off the plans and then fled with the proceeds. In a poignant scene in Vive L'Amour, a film by Tsai Ming-liang, two actors look forlornly at the skeletal, incomplete building where they had bought an apartment. The scene illustrates the great sense of loss and distrust with which a lot of people once viewed the construction business. Chou says that Ruentex's focus on branding, professionalism and its reputation relieves any such fears in its clients. Well-educated buyers with a different set of purchasing criteria have helped too, says Ruan.
The real estate market in the 1980s and 1990s was all about making money from both the developer and buyer's point of view. "People didn't live in apartments, but just saw them as ways to make money, as investments," Ruan says. "The thing now is that consumers don't believe that they can make 10 percent on them in a year. If you buy something, you want it, and you want to keep it. You need it."
So how does this new-found sensibility relate to the theater of sales homes? Ruan says that most homebuyers only make such a purchase once in a lifetime and they are very practical. "It's kind of like a blind date or an arranged marriage, you're going to meet someone that you know you're going to spend the rest of your life with," he says. "But before you meet this person you both dress up as fancy as you can. It's different from real life, they know that, they know you're only dressed like this today, that it won't be like that for the rest of your life."
Buyers are very conscious of the unreal appearance of the sales home. The phenomenon is a product of stiff competition in the residential property market and a stark contrast to the skimpy brochures with pictures of happy Western families and a rudimentary floor plan that characterized marketing material a decade ago.
The medium has also created a unique metier for architects and interior designers. Given that it liberates them from the constraints of practicality, one would imagine that every architect and designer in town would be keen to express their funkier ideas on such projects.
But Yeh Ying, a writer and editor for the design magazine IW, and Ruan both agree that this is not really the case. The very unreality of the houses deters both architects and designers. "Sales homes are so temporary, like a stage set, when the play is over, they're gone," says Ruan. "Designers won't talk about them to me, they only talk about real architecture." Architects also view them as mildly embarrassing and only see them as ways to increase cash flow for struggling practices.
Developers, too, view the projects in a similar fashion. They typically hire one architect for the sales house and another for the building itself. The sales house is assigned to a younger, more experimental architect while the building is designed by a more established one. This practice accounts for the divergence between the look of the two products and prevents the platform from becoming a proving ground for young architects. Developers think younger architects are too idealistic for buildings, but perfect for sales houses. "Most architects who do sales houses enter public competitions for real buildings, rather than going through a developer," says Ruan. "Buyers calculate very carefully how much they get for their dollar and when they buy apartments they don't talk about dreams, but when they go to a sales house, they want to see something fantastic."
The theater of the sales house and the reality of the apartment in which one lives appear, then, to be distinctly separate. Yeh sums it up perfectly when she says, "Consumers know they're not going to look like the girl in the ad, but they buy the cosmetics nonetheless."