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Paper short abstract

This paper is concerned with how to rebuild the unrecorded or misrepresented history of Indigenous architecture through partaking in the co-creating construction process of a Paiwan slate house, 14 months of fieldwork in Taiwan, and utilising visual methods as a radical approach to history writing.

Paper long abstract

In the field of architectural history and theory, Indigenous architecture is often marginalised as ‘the vernacular’, rather paying attention to the building styles and materials than the history since it is ‘architecture without architects’. At the same time, anthropologists see house merely as a research approach to social reproduction and kinship studies instead of as a subject. This paper is concerned with how to rebuild the unrecorded or misrepresented history of Indigenous architecture through the co-creating construction process of the Kadrangian slate house in Southern Taiwan collaborating with the Paiwan people as a radical approach to history writing.

The study develops multimodal methods of co-creating via oral history interviews, old village site visits, archives, and via spatial practice of a house threatened by policies and cultural discontinuity as the centre—a Technical Activity (TA) lying in the intergenerational shared time, materiality, the body, and the milieu that confronted the predicaments of capitalist society, whilst utilising visual methods such as ethnographic film, time-lapse photography, maps and drawings to bridge spatial practice and the anthropology of technics.

I will share personal experiences throughout my 14-month fieldwork living with the community in compound roles: a PhD researcher, an apprentice, an architectural professional, a filmmaker and, a family member accepted by them. Furthermore, being Principal Investigator of the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) which supported the fieldwork, this paper will also reflect on the way how I manage the enormous audio-visual data created, and on its dissemination as an open-access digital repository.