Founding Colonial Japanese Police Station To Contemporary Cultural and Creative Center (1896−2015)

Abstract

We explore the founding and transformation of a historical building, a police station, during the Japanese occupation of Meinong, a Hakka gathering located in southern Taiwan. We focus on the construction process of transformation from an expropriating residential space into rebuilding a formal public office into remodeling for a popular cultural and creative center, which has gone through for over a century. The police station has undergone a total of five architectural form changes. First, it was established under the control of colonial governance three times, but it has been empty since the colonial factors disappeared. Secondly, the new government built another police station in front of it. Subsequently, with the preservation policy of historical buildings, the colonial police station was restored and reused. Through literature inquiry and the transformation process of architectural form and the political and historical aspects of that process, it is demonstrated how the migratory police bureaucracy was established from strange management during the period of Japanese occupation (1895−1945) to a formal police mechanism. Finally, it flourished within a popular culture with new values through historic preservation and reuse policy.