Alishan, Taiwan—We feel that in order for Alishan to compete as a major tourist destination, the connection between the train line and its ecosystems must be foregrounded in a comprehensive tour experience. It is as important to bring new ecologies to the site as it is to celebrate the existing ones—not through a superficial or invasive overlay of uses, but through a projection of new and exciting possibilities that emerge from a coherent engagement with the inherent ecological structure. Our proposal is for an agricultural strip that integrates local food production with farm-to-table international restaurants as a microeconomy of taste tourism. Farming and consumption thus are condensed in an economically productive corridor (rather than creating sprawl) that reconfigures the relationship between sites of food production and consumption into a more integrated system specific to the site.

Agricultural production and distribution no longer follow the antiquated model in which produce grown in the “periphery” (rural space between urban hubs) is shipped to cities for consumption. Today, food production claims about half of the world’s landmass and is a complex global system. The development of farming technologies has enabled mass agricultural production at a previously unimaginable scale, yet these modes of production and distribution have had grave environmental and political consequences. With the current world population at 7.2 billion and projected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, one of the major challenges facing us will be the sustainable production and distribution of food. In our current climate, however, food scarcity is artificial, as farming technologies enable production to the point of excess. Nearly half of all food produced worldwide is wasted each year, while 795 million people (roughly one-ninth of the world’s population) are malnourished.

We believe our proposal for Alishan could serve as one of many possible models for rethinking agricultural production, distribution, and consumption. Whereas farming—and specifically monoculture—tends to homogenize the landscape, we propose to accentuate the ecological variety of the four distinct ecosystems through which the Alishan Railway passes, so that each change in climate is marked by a shift in agricultural production. A journey up the Alishan Mountain thus directly reflects the journey through the mountain’s four distinct ecosystems in a gradient of culture, cuisine, and landscape.

As the tourism industry develops along the Alishan Railroad, a new cultural fusion will take hold across a spectrum of practices, including eating, entertainment, and relaxation. A program of cultural fusion entails not simply the transplanting of culture from other countries to Alishan, but the production of a wholly new culture. Creative experimentation with cuisine, accented by locally grown ingredients at different levels of the climatic gradient and influenced by cultures from around the globe, will render this site an international destination.

First Prize, International Competition

Principals: Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto

Design Team: Eva Perez de Vega Steele, Jason Scroggin, Jonathan D. Solomon

Interns and assistants: Joe Kobayashi, Yuya Suzuki, Keisuke Kitagawa, Alver Mensana, Akari Takebayashi, Akira Nakamura, Aki Eto, Arthur Chu, David Nam, Ian Gordon

Structural engineer: Cecil Balmond, Charles Walker, Arup Ltd., London

Architectural consultants: Philip Fei, Fei and Cheng