Unpredictability is a major characteristic of the city’s temporality and is now, after the fall of deterministic modernist models, accepted by urban planners even as part of the city’s functions3: we expect from a city to be unpredictable because from its disorder emerge opportunities, encounters, escapes from boredom and solitude – unless you are one of those who likes to find solitude among an anonymous crowd. But as it regulates most urban aspects, unpredictability will also influence the traffic: trips from one place to another are difficult to control in both duration and quality, and congestion therefore never totally avoidable.

The metro addresses that specific problem. It is obviously a fast, underground system, which physically avoids the city so that it has no obstacle but the human fret it loads and unloads every two minutes. But as the crowd fills the metro hallways it brings along the unpredictability from above: the metro architecture has to develop strategies to suppress this tendency and replace it with a different – and perhaps conflicting – kind of temporality.

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PERMANENCE OF THE METRO

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The unique contact between the metro and the city is where the gate emerges out of the sidewalk, as the tiny extremity of an enormous hidden object. Going down the escalators, down into the ground from one world to another, we change our behavior. We hold the handrail, in line with the crowd, at a regulated speed. We then stand in line when passing, beep – beep!, the ticket gate, and in line again when waiting for the metro, following the marks painted on the platform. In between those steps we find ourselves speeding in large hallways that are oversized for our bodies, but wide enough to contain the rush-hour crowd. No collisions, no jamming, no nothing: this is the reduction of paths to an efficient and predictable flow.

While above the public space is used for almost every human activities – moving, communicating, eating, drinking, observing, sleeping,… – we find the metro hallways all the more large as they are empty of most of these. Chairs and benches are too rare for us to stop and rest. Food and drinks are prohibited, and the places associated with it, so important in the city streets, are absent. Function of the metro public space is reduced to that of moving, passing by. The metro is the means, never the end.

This reduction of function leads to a reduction of social events: if there is nothing to buy or to do, there is less to talk about with strangers. Aside from its actions, it is the composition of the crowd itself that is controlled: the electronic metro card allows a precise monitoring of our entries/exits, and the price of the ticket (two or three times a bus ride) supported by the well-guarded gates are powerful filters that will guarantee a certain homogeneity of the metro population.

Finally, the visual environment, so prolific and heterogenic in Taipei, fades as soon as passing the first escalator. Most stations share the same white, clean, straightforward aesthetic; a result from both their functional homogeneity, and perhaps the need to express the coherence of a large architectural ensemble. A coherence which is only permitted by the relative youth of a network that opened its first line in 1996. Signs therefore serve as the only differentiators between the stations, with a simple primary color code, and English-Chinese names. They also serve as direct mediators between the metro entity and its users: aside from making sure we are on the right path, many texts, videos and recordings will tell us not to eat, drink or chew-gum, not to talk to loudly on the phone, or how protect ourselves if someone tries to stab us.

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