Two alumni of Department of Architecture have once again won the Third Far East Architecture Award. Yu Ying-chang and Tu Wen-yu won a Special Award for “Digital Wright Falling Water Villa”. Their work was the only piece from Taiwan, which entered the final contest among the 108 works presented by 25 countries.

They said that their inspiration came from a well-known architecture master Wright’s work—“Falling Water Villa” built on a waterfall. However, they interpreted Wright’s work with modernized digital technology by stressing the movement of water and air elements, making it vivid, different from the original concepts of being simple and horizontal. Tu who just returned from the United States last week, said “ We want to create something different, not what others have done before. So we decided to interpret Wright’s work with modern idea and technology showing the movement of waterfall while keeping his original spirits”.

They encountered a lot of difficulties during the three-month period of designing. They have wasted a lot of time to count the structure by computer since they only carried with them a notebook when they were going abroad for studying. They have also encountered a bottleneck on how to put their work on the Website. “ Despite I had two part-time jobs, I still had to work on this project until the midnight after getting off duty. I had once considered giving up but I’m now very glad I’ve gone through that,” Tu said.

Yu Ying-chang who is very good at digital technology, is diligent in his studies. When he studies, he never leaves anything confusing but tries every possibility to make it understood. He graduated from the Department of Architecture (DA) in 1996 and had served as an assistant at DA for three years since 1998. The DA’s homepage designed by Yu had won the first place of home page designing contest held by Tamkang University (TKU). He and Tu Wen-yu went to pursue their advanced study at Columbia University in 2001. They are now working at an architect office and an engineering company, respectively, after obtaining their Master degree. They will back to Taiwan in May to receive the award in person.