Juye Joint Design Studio

Established in 2015, the "Juye Joint Design Studio (竹冶聯合設計工作室, or called Juye Design)" originated from the "Art Making Town" campaign in Hsinchu’s Guanxi Township, and the youth returning home movement, which aspires to preserve traditional culture. As a Hsinchu-born Hakka, architect Luo Jie (羅傑), the founder of Juye studio, not only assisted in the renovation of the old houses in the area, he also hopes to mix traditional local elements with innovative architectural designs to re-present the memories of Hakka history and culture, and to preserve the beauty of Hakka culture in an inclusive way.

Luo Jie, founder of Juye Joint Design Studio

The spirit of Juye design studio is "innovative design comes from traditional culture." Therefore, Luo invokes the concept of "regional architecture" in architectural design. The architect emphasized that instead of blindly copying the old, he prefers to return to tradition, and more importantly, keep pace with the times and integrate local and cultural elements into modern architecture. Luo said, "The regional architecture we understand is that all materials, manpower, and construction methods are close to the local environment. It does not need to pursue a special shape, but you would know it is from here at a glance."

In order to make the regional architectural concept and traditional culture complement each other, Juye Design is divided into three parts, including a cultural asset group, an architectural design group, and a cultural creativity group, which form a cross-disciplinary team, so that its buildings are not simply exterior designs. Different from ordinary architectural studios, Juye’s architects begin to draw design drawings after measuring the land and confirming the customer’s needs. Juye Design will first have the cultural assets team conduct a cultural and historical survey. Through interviews with seniors, reading books, etc., they learn about the site’s cultural and historical background. Then the project will be handed over to the architectural design team to measure the land and draw a 3D simulation map. Finally, the cultural creativity team will use its imagination to integrate cultural factors into the building.

Juye Design also explores the local culture, history and memory of Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli, so that people can understand this land more easily and deeply. In addition, it has revitalized a land contracted out by the government, and in line with the Hakka Affairs Council’s Hakka village policy, it has used the subsidies for hardware facilities, such as overall environmental planning, street renovations and slow-moving systems. For example, with the "small sign" campaign, it’s hoped that Taiwan’s signboards, which are very distinctive but also very messy, can be tidied up and beautified, not only in Guanxi but throughout the whole country.