Chinese Name: 高而潘
Date of Birth: June 10, 1928
Date of Death: November 14, 2022
Place of Birth: Taipei City (Northern Taiwan)
Did You Know?
Part of the first generation of post-war architects in Taiwan, Kao Erh-pan was educated in Japanese and Chinese during the transition between the Japanese and Nationalist governments and went on to help promote the building of the nation with his architectural skills, seeking to understand the pulse of society and strive for both aesthetic and practical functionality. Amid association, organization, and institutional reform, he helped unite architectural professionals to jointly enhance the living environment and public safety, and to devote themselves to architectural education and cultivating the future. As a result, he was an icon of modern architectural development in Taiwan.
Kao Erh-pan was born in 1928 in Dadaocheng, Taipei, into a prestigious family. His grandfather founded the famous Kao Yuan-fa Fabric Store (高源發布莊) in front of Xiahai City God Temple (霞海城隍廟). He graduated from the Department of Architecture of Taiwan Provincial College of Engineering (now National Cheng Kung University) in 1951 and passed the Advanced Examination for Public Employees and the Industrial Technician Examination in the same year. After graduating, he stayed on as an assistant professor at his alma mater, reading a lot of the school's books and absorbing the avant-garde architectural ideas of both the East and the West.
After joining the firm Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects & Engineers (基泰工程司), he went to Japan in 1960 to attend the Tokyo World Design Conference with the support of chief architect Kwan Sung-sing (關頌聲), and spent two months each at the design offices of Takeo Sato (佐藤武夫), a pioneering architect in architectural acoustics, and Kunio Maekawa (前川國男), known as the flagship architect of Japanese modernism. In addition to incorporating Japanese architectural culture into his own designs, Kao received higher education in Taiwan’s local architecture and was deeply influenced by 20th-century modernist architect Le Corbusier, who he regarded as a spiritual mentor.
At the age of 39, Kao left the firm to open his own practice. His most iconic works include the Hu Shih Park (胡適墓園), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the CTS Building. The design of the memorial Hu Shih Park is simple and bright, subverting the gloomy image of cemeteries and memorials in the eyes of Taiwanese; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, completed in the 1980s, was a milestone in modern architecture in the country with its concept of "metabolism" and spatial extension; and the CTS Building, completed in 1983, was the first building in Taiwan to be completed with a volumetric concept, with public space on the ground floor and underground for public enjoyment, a groundbreaking innovation.
As deputy chair of Longshan Temple (龍山寺) in Taipei, Kao designed the temple’s underground bathroom and meditation space. In the 1990s, when the temple had a large number of worshippers and limited space, the problem of toilets was troubling them, and Kao solved it by using a basement and reducing the size of the ground-level building to reduce the disturbance to the temple's monuments.
During his career as an architect from the 1960s to the 1990s, Kao designed a rich and diverse body of work that became more refined over time. These three decades were a watershed in Taiwan’s political, economic, and social evolution, so his work can be considered a testament to the practice of modern architecture in Taiwan. His designs for residences, schools, hospitals, factories, stations, art museums, banks, and commercial buildings faithfully reflect the changes and evolution of contemporary Taiwan's society, economy, and culture.
Kao Erh-pan donated his more than 8,000 architectural illustrations from his practice to the National Taiwan Museum's collection, and the Museum has not only digitized all of them, but also organized the "Foresights: The Special Exhibition of the Masterpieces by Architect Kao Erh-pan" exhibition and the publication of a book on it. Through these valuable historical materials on modern architecture, the public can understand how this first generation of post-war architects pursued modernization and shaped the architectural style of Taiwan.
Swimming in the current of the times, Kao was always courageous enough to challenge the mainstream, steadily traveling on his ideal trajectory with his robust professional skills. He believed that design thinking must start from the pulse of society to provide the most relevant design for the world around it. For him, architecture is not the work of the architect alone, but a work done in concert with clients and users.