| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 建築學系碩士班 === 97 === Baseball in Taiwan appears to have drawn in large fan base and professional games. But observing from the daily life and general environment of a self-claimed baseball kingdom, one can hardly piece together an overall picture where baseball in an integral part of life. Perhaps, baseball is never immersed into Taiwan’s community life and spaces.
If the levels of Taiwan’s baseball development can be divided into individuals, family, community, and the larger scale of city and country, the weakest nexus would be the intermediate level of community. And if people only reminisce the glorious past yet fail to remember the original passion for baseball and the significance of community involvement, the continuance of Taiwan’s baseball games could be jeopardized and the island would be infested by “cities without baseball.”
This design thesis intends to summon the collective memory of and identification with the baseball via the expression of my own baseball experiences. By referring to related international case studies and analyzing the present-day issues and problems of baseball environment, I argue that baseball as a ‘Game’ and ‘Competition’ should find its way back to “the Wild” and “Home.” I further employ Shih-lin’s San-Yi market (disorderly environment and a rare housing-market mixed use of weak community sense) and the nearby Ho-Gan-Chien neighborhood (still characterized as certain degree of city wild-land compared with metropolitan Taipei) as the sites to trigger social design. Baseball then becomes an event and spatial medium to activate community mobilization, living interaction, and LOHAS symbiotic mechanism; and from the spatial scale of homeland and community, the probability of a true baseball city might be re-imagined.
My design strategy plans to build a new tee ball field in the abandoned San-Yi market courtyard to induce participations from many single-parent and lower-income families living at upper levels to autonomously hands-on improve the environment. Outdoor staircases and corridors surrounding the courtyard are designed to expand public spaces for game-watching and further transform the decaying market-housing into mutually-dependent symbiotic families.
The mid-range goal is to extend the baseball ambiance to the Hou-gang-qian community by ushering an elevated running trail which connects the isolated and baseball-banned campuses, parks, and homeland. The wild field and the green can be thus blended into the everyday scenes of Hua-ling Park and San-jiao-du to enhance the opportunities of interaction between different age and social groups.
On such basis, the concept of ‘promoting community baseball to baseball-community’ can be brought to more city corners to strengthen community and city identification. The imaginations of a baseball city are then able to leap out of the set patterns of building humongous domes with tremendous budgets, and return to the wild fun of playing games and the collective effervescence and sport spirit of baseball competitions.
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