Kris Yao/Artech

In spite of the prodigious amount of waork produced by Yao,he is still relatively young. Perhaps his most enduring contribution will not be the builings at all, but rather the example of creative entreprenurialism. He has shown, in a country seemingly reluctant to accept the value of design, that it is not mutually exclusive to do many buildings, do them quickly, and do them well. What the architects at Artech, throughout Taiwan, and now from lands far away, see, is a designer insistent upon rigour and high quality, one who is open to ideas regardles of their source; one who understands the building culture of his homeland and is committed to improving the status of architecture within it. The work within these pages is a testament that this committment is yielding important results.