Futuristic Ghost Town in Taiwan..

[MOOKIE]

it is build on the shores of a town called San-chih in Taiwan
View them by these coordinates with Google Earth;

25°15'39.43"N
121°28'37.72"E



This story is from somebody who lives there in that area (american guy)

What a trip! I happen to live within walking distance of those buildings. I really love them. I'm an American who has lived in Taiwan for fifteen or so years and I live right down the street. If you look at the picture with the girl in the bikini and you see those hi-rises below her right hand. Directly behind those hi-rises there is a villa of also quite interesting experimental modernist houses which is where I'm sitting right now.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that I might have seen this group who took the pictures. About a month ago I was coming back from the grocery store and I honked at a group of four blonde tourists coming out of the place. I was hassling them because after so many years of being hassled as a foreigner I couldn't resist screwing with them. They seemed to be cool European types as though and they didn't bother looking up to see who was honking.

But anyway, you guys want to know the down-low on those things and I've been researching it for a long time. I teach college English as one of my jobs and I always ask my classes to tell me everything they know about that place since I live right next to it. So over the years I've gleaned a few things.

First of all, what are they made of?
Well, you can easily realize that if you see them first hand. The flying saucer parts are made of fiberglass. This is not surprising at all since here on the north coast one of the main businesses is the construction of fiberglass yachts. The fiberglass is attached to a central column made of ferrcement and actually there are some really nice examples of ferrocement sculpture in that development as well. There's also some really tacky use of fiberglass to do poorly made synthetic stones around some of the swimming pools in the interior.

Next, what happened to it?
Well, I've heard a dozen version of this one, but the one I tend to put the most faith in, because it is fairly common in Taiwanese real estate development as well as having the flavor of mundane reality, is that there was a falling out of the partners towards the end of construction. Also, consider that this was approximately the time of the biggest real estate bubble in history which was even bigger than the one in the US today, that is the Japanese real estate bubble of the eighties. This is a relic from that era and while you may protest that Taiwan in not Japan. Well, it's a long story but suffice it to say that Taiwan is indeed a former colony of Japan and their economies are interrelated in many complex ways and Taiwan's real estate was certainly caught up in a huge bubble at that time. The house I'm in now was worth around half a million in those days. Today it probably couldn't get a hundred and fifty. So, it's really not too mysterious what happened if you know a bit about the economic history of real estate in Taiwan.

What was it meant to be?
This one is pretty easy if you look around the place. It was something like a hotel/amusement park/spa kind of thing. Again, this is no surprise if you're in the area and have a chance to peek around. There were two very large and complex swimming pools with water slides in the middle of it that may have had other features like a wave machine. It wasn't meant to be single family housing or anything like that. It was more like a fancy hotel or resort. Although it's cool to think of living there as a permanent residence, I assume it was too costly for that sort of thing.


I've thought about ways to rehabilitate it. My wife works in the architecture business and we know a lot of local architects and we've asked them but most people say there's just no way to do anything with it without a lot of money which takes us back to the original issue. I still hope that something can be done because I just love it. It's a treasure in my opinion. My brother in-law has told me to run for local office and try and get grant money to turn it into a school. Sounds like a nice fantasy, but I'm not even a citizen.










Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a few words help too.
This place was made as a resort in the eighties and it was never completed because of financing.
I assume it was one of the local fiberglass boat companies as there are a few around here.
I was so stoked when I first saw this place. This is alternative architecture at its finest in my book.
Total Jetsons spaced out freakazoid style.
Later I'll get more pics later from the inside.
Another shot similar to the one on the intro page, but with a scooter for some perspective. Also, you can see more clearly in this picture that this was a fairly massive development with lots of candy coated colors.

Although the people in Taiwan are generally shorter than Americans it's interesting that the ceilings of most houses are almost never lower than ten feet These things are big.

[MOOKIE]

Update 6 pack shoot:

[N4D2]

Wow. Very Jetsons. Or carnival ride-ish. Great photos of the place, and background! The HDR's really add to the surrealism.

[Dan]

Are any of these photos actually yours?

[MOOKIE]

No this is just to share with you guys...I've never been in Taiwan.

[Carnage517]

That place looks killer. Id love to have a house look like that