A Story of Nobility in Colonial Urban Asia: Victorian Influence and the Red House in Taipei

Abstract

As a stylistic form of representing the past, the Gothic Revival emerged as a reaction to the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, by establishing a sense of morality in architecture and urbanism. Its rise and development in the High Victorian period therefore represented a form of social nobility to the profession. This paper examines the construction of nobility in British architectural history and its implantation and evolution in the urban East. The Red House and its located city, Taipei, in Taiwan, in which inscribed its modern urban history and development on the building, is selected as a case. This study surveys the interplay between the moral/colonial nobility mentioned above and the de facto social circumstances in post-war urban Taipei, and as such describes the spatiotemporal trajectory of Victorian influence on urban Asia, from colonial times to the present.