The main axis as utopian architecture
Campus planning at National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16768135 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hsiu-Ling Kuo (0000-0003-2801-4124, National Chung Cheng University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 1-24 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-17 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9373 • E-ISSN: 1469-8447 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14649373.2026.2647615 |
| OpenAlex | W7154720521 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Established in the late 1980s in Chiayi County, the campus of National Chung Cheng University (CCU) offers a compelling case study for interrogating the cultural politics of space, utopian architecture, and post-authoritarian civic imagination in Taiwan. Conceived during a transition from martial law to democratization, CCU’s master plan reflects the developmental state’s ambition to redistribute higher education resources while inscribing a “civic utopia” into the landscape. At the heart of this vision lies a monumental main axis—a symbolic spatial spine linking the Grand Auditorium and the Library—functioning as a ceremonial stage, a pedagogical environment, and nucleus of collective identity. This study argues that CCU’s main axis embodies a hybridized architectural language negotiating between Western paradigms of campus-town planning and Taiwanese cultural spatiality. Drawing on archival records and design documents, the analysis situates CCU within transnational traditions of American campus design while tracing its adaptation to Taiwan’s unique ecological, seismic, and cultural conditions. From a cultural studies perspective, the axis operates as a site of meaning-making: the Grand Auditorium enacts commemorative memory, while the Library anchors intellectual centrality, together producing a spatial discourse of civic utopia. The planning of CCU coincided with Taiwan’s democratization and regional development. By analyzing CCU’s architectural expression, this article demonstrates how campus planning materializes the developmental-state ideology of 1980s Taiwan. Ultimately, it reveals how such projects blended modernist aesthetics with localized symbolism, shaping collective memory and civic pedagogy within the broader cultural negotiations of identity and modernity in East Asia
Government (linguistics) · Perspective (graphical) · Placemaking · Work (physics) · Architecture and Computational Design · Architecture, Modernity, and Design · Seismic and Structural Analysis of Tall Buildings
| Highly cited | No |
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