Geometry and Light of Knowledge: Selected Buildings of Academia Sinica, edited by the Department of General Affairs, was published by the Academia Sinica Press in December 2025.
Since Academia Sinica relocated to Nangang in 1954, more than seventy years have passed. What began as farmland and a few laboratory buildings has grown into a 38-hectare research campus housing nearly forty institutes. The campus is not only a hub for knowledge production but also a living spatial chronicle, recording layer by layer the evolution of science, culture, and modern architecture in Taiwan.
As the first comprehensive volume to examine thirty representative buildings across the campus, Geometry and Light of Knowledge treats Academia Sinica as a cultural landscape to be read, traced, and interpreted. Through a chronology of time and geography, the book guides readers through seventy years of architectural evolution: the 1950s–60s saw elegant early campus structures such as the Hu Shih Memorial Hall and Fu Ssu-nien Library, designed with symmetry, axiality, and restraint by Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects; the 1970s introduced modernist vocabularies by architects such as Wang Chiu-Hua and Wang Da-Hong, making buildings like the Library of Institute of European and American Studies, the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, and the Institute of Molecular Biology in Taiwan’s architectural history; from the 1980s onward, with research expanding rapidly, architects including Han Pao-Teh and C.Y. Lee contributed works that formed today’s diverse and multilayered campus identity.
These buildings are not static structures but resonant expressions of scientific momentum. Each construction reflects the academic priorities, scientific needs, and intellectual aspirations of its era. Through rich photographs, archival materials, and architectural analysis, the book illustrates how buildings shape the everyday lives of researchers, balance function and aesthetics, and collectively create the distinctive “Academia Sinica landscape.”
Echoing the message in the President’s Preface, the campus buildings are more than brick and mortar; they are cultural assets that carry historical memory and, moreover, illuminate the course of architectural development in Taiwan. Their forms, axes, scales, and the interplay of light silently convey the spirit of research, turning space into an extension of scholarly culture.
This book is a visual survey that bridges architecture, history, and cultural studies. It is not merely a guide to buildings but a three-dimensional blueprint revealing how knowledge is housed, practiced, and recorded. Whether you are interested in architecture, aesthetics, cultural history, or the story of how Academia Sinica evolved from rural fields into an international research hub, this book offers a journey through time—inviting you to rediscover the forms of knowledge and the traces it casts in light and shadow.
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